PENNSYLVANIA, USA — Voting rights groups have petitioned the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to immediately hear a case that could decide whether thousands of mail-in ballots could potentially be thrown out in this year's election.
The groups, which include the ACLU of Pennsylvania, filed a "King's Bench" petition for the Court to answer the question of whether mail-in ballots that are not dated properly should be thrown out, despite the ballots being submitted on time.
"We're asking them to once and for all decide this so that all of the election officials in the Commonwealth can comply with the Constitution," said Steve Loney, the ACLU of Pennsylvania's Senior Supervising Attorney.
The petition comes after the Pennsylvania Supreme Court struck down a ruling by the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court due to a procedural issue. That ruling said that throwing out misdated ballots is unconstitutional.
"I think that in vacating the Commonwealth Court's decision in the last version of this case, there was a strong suggestion from multiple members of the court that they need to decide this issue, and that when we come and when a party comes back with all 67 county boards of election as part of the case, that they would decide it," Loney said.
The argument from the ACLU is that having the wrong date on the ballot is meaningless since the ballot would already have to have been submitted on time for it to count.
"There's no allegation that anybody is voting out of time, that they're voting early, that they're voting late," Loney said. "The handwritten date isn't useful for figuring out whether people timely voted. Everybody knows that we're talking about timely votes."
The Republican National Committee and the Pennsylvania Republican Party, which are fighting the case as defendants, say that changing this law would undermine confidence in the election, and call the law common sense.