The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has ruled that county offices should not count mail-in ballots without accurate dates on their return envelopes. The court directed counties to sequester such ballots, pending legislation that could re-determine their status.
State legislators can — and should — resolve this matter by removing all unnecessary and irrelevant requirements, including accurately dated envelopes, from Pennsylvania’s mail balloting law.
Until then, voters who have yet to return their ballots should double- and triple-check their paperwork, especially return envelopes, making sure they have filled out all required fields. Voters who have already returned a ballot, and are uncertain whether they properly dated the envelope, should contact their county elections division, or the Pennsylvania Secretary of State’s office. There’s still time to ensure your vote is counted.
The confusing legal battle over ballots in undated envelopes is another example of the uncertainty that is eroding voters’ trust in the system. State law on mailed ballots is clear: “The elector shall then fill out, date and sign the declaration printed on [the outer] envelope.” When some county election bureaus unilaterally authorized ballots with missing or inaccurate dates, they overstepped their authority by ignoring the letter of the law.
Six state Supreme Court justices split on a larger question: Does Pennsylvania’s mail-in voting law violate the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964? That law prohibits states from rejecting votes in a federal election due to “an error or omission on any record or paper relating to any application, registration, or other act requisite to voting,” if the error or omission is irrelevant to the voter’s qualifications under state law.
The federal law seems to refer to paperwork before voting that was designed to disenfranchise Black voters based on minor mistakes in registration documents. Federal law does not seem to cover paperwork relating to the votes themselves. That means state legislators, not the courts, will likely have to handle problems with Pennsylvania’s mail-in voting law. They should do it before the next election. Pennsylvania voters should no longer have to face uncertainty and ambiguity in their voting laws.
First Published: November 2, 2022, 9:11 p.m.