A new milestone has been reached in a years-long fight over mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania. On Tuesday, the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a lower court’s ruling, saying that the state can no longer throw out some of these ballots.
The legal fight between Democrats and Republicans, as well as affiliated groups, centers on a requirement to handwrite the return date on mail-in ballot envelopes. While the ballots themselves in these cases may have no issues, if the return date is incorrect in any way, the ballot gets thrown out.
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What are groups saying?
Republicans contend that the ballots should be thrown out, as a matter of election security, and say that groups fighting in the lawsuit “are essentially fighting to count illegal ballots.” Democrats, like Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, say that ballots shouldn’t be thrown out due to “meaningless errors.”
Other groups on the side of keeping and counting the ballots include the American Federation of Teachers of Pennsylvania, Common Cause Pennsylvania, the League of Women Voters of Pennsylvania, the Black Political Empowerment Project and others. AFT President Wendy Coleman says that the decision is a “victory for Pennsylvania voters and our democracy,” according to NBC News.
Groups opposed to the measure include the Republican National Committee and the Pennsylvania Republican Party, which are now looking at options to further combat the ruling.
The history
The case originated when a voter sued over the rejection of their ballot during the 2022 midterm elections. Just two of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties decided to defend the practice, and were later joined by the Republican groups.
The requirement has been the subject of a lengthy legal battle and has resulted in thousands of ballots being thrown out over the years, something that the three-judge panel that handed down the ruling says “seems to hamper rather than facilitate election efficiency.”
The decision also states that the panel was “Unable to justify the Commonwealth’s practice of discarding ballots contained in return envelopes with missing or incorrect dates that has resulted in the disqualification of thousands of presumably proper ballots.”
Why is it so important?
The case could be brought before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, which has already stated that it is willing to look into the case.
Pennsylvania is also a politically divided state, having alternated between voting for President Donald Trump in 2016 and 2024, and for former Presidents Joe Biden in 2020 and Barack Obama in 2012. In the last three presidential elections, the winner has been declared with a margin of victory of around only 1%. The Senate race in the 2024 election was won by just 15,000 votes.
