The Pennsylvania Supreme Court granted on Friday an emergency request from Republicans to pause a lower court’s ruling that mail-in ballots with missing dates should still be counted, a move that leaves longstanding questions about undated ballots unresolved days before the election.
In addition to the eleventh-hour stay, Republicans had also pleaded with the state’s highest court to take a conclusive position on the undated ballots, but the justices declined to go that far. In an unusual move, Democrats agreed with Republicans that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court should take a stance.
The emergency pause came after Pennsylvania’s appellate court decided that people who neglect to fill in the date on the outer envelope of their mail-in ballot will still have their vote count.
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The appellate court said the decision applied to 69 undated ballots from a Philadelphia special election that took place earlier this year, but the Republican National Committee argued in court papers that the decision would “unleash chaos” in the 2024 general election.
The RNC said state law made clear that undated mail-in ballots should not be counted and that the appellate court undermined that, effectively causing confusion for other counties outside of Philadelphia right before Election Day.
The Democratic National Committee agreed with the RNC that Pennsylvania counties needed the state’s highest court to step in and take a clear position on undated ballots. But in contrast to Republicans, the DNC, as well as the American Civil Liberties Union, said they believed undated mail-in ballots should count.
The ACLU called handwritten dates on ballot envelopes “utterly meaningless.” Mail-in ballots that arrive after polls close are not counted in Pennsylvania regardless of what the handwritten dates on the envelopes say. The ACLU said counties that reject ballots because of missing dates are disenfranchising voters on a “flimsy basis.”
An appeal in the Philadelphia case could land back in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, and with the current lack of clarity from the state’s top court, legal fights over undated ballots are guaranteed to persist in the Keystone State.
Republicans still billed the order on Friday as a win, asserting that it meant that no county should count undated mail-in ballots. Democrats vote far more frequently by mail than Republicans in Pennsylvania, so rejecting undated mail-in ballots would likely hurt Democratic candidates more.
The RNC said in a statement that the order was one of three recent legal successes for the GOP in Pennsylvania, a swing state that both Republicans and Democrats view as a must-win for the presidential race.
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“We have secured three major victories for election integrity in Pennsylvania just this week: we won extended early voting in Bucks County; we won signature verification and observer access in Erie County; and we won — for the fifth time — the dated ballot case in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court,” spokeswoman Claire Zunk said.
Article III Project founder Mike Davis, an ardent supporter of former President Donald Trump, also celebrated the state’s emergency pause, saying on X that it “puts the date requirement back into effect” and “makes it harder for Democrats to cheat.”
