HARRISBURG, Pa. — Mail-in and absentee ballots that arrive on time will still be counted in Pennsylvania even if the ballot has an incorrect or missing date. That's the decision handed down by U.S. District Judge Susan Paradise Baxter on Tuesday.
Pennsylvania groups represented by the American Civil Liberties Union brought the suit to federal court, challenging a 2019 Pennsylvania election law.
"Under Pennsylvania law it has the mandatory word "shall" be dated," said John E. Jones III, president of Dickinson College and a former U.S. district judge.
In her decision, Baxter found one federal law overrules Pennsylvania's state law.
Jones said the Civil Rights Act of 1964 allows broad voting rights aimed to prevent disenfranchisement.
"It says that if there are errors that are minimal, that those errors should not disqualify a particular ballot," Jones said. "What the judge found in this case is, in effect, that that law succeeds in allowing those votes to be counted."
"The state knows, or the county knows, when they mailed it and when they got it back," added Stephen Medvic, a government professor at Franklin and Marshall College. "That's all that's really relevant because the ballot has to be cast within a certain time period."
Until now, county elections officials had been setting mail-in ballots with dating errors aside.
In November 2022, more than 7,600 mail-in ballots in 12 Pennsylvania counties were not counted because the correct date did not appear on the outer envelope, according to the decision.
The Shapiro administration said it's pleased with Baxter's ruling.
The decision could be appealed to a higher court.
"If it gets back to the third circuit, I think it's quite likely that the third circuit will affirm this judge's ruling and that it will stick," Jones said.
Medvic said the U.S. Supreme Court could take up the case to answer a different question.
"Can individuals or groups bring these cases to the court or does the federal government have to do it through the Justice Department? That's a technicality, but that's a question the Supreme Court might want to decide," he said. "They're likely to end up weighing in on this."
Some counties are already starting to follow the court's order.
The Lancaster County Board of Elections announced it instructed staff to include the 285 mail-in ballots that were missing a date or had an incorrect date in its election certification.
An election official from another county in our area said he was not expecting this decision to come just a few days before Thanksgiving and that the county is working on next steps.