Republicans ask Pennsylvania court to delay decision on mail-in ballot envelope rules

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — Republicans wasted no time in appealing a Pennsylvania court decision that would relax mail-in voting rules and on Thursday asked the state Supreme Court to overturn the lower court’s decision. released a day early.

The state and national Republican parties filed a lawsuit. emergency request that the justices have put on hold a Commonwealth Court ruling that the envelopes voters use to mail ballots do not have to be precisely dated by hand, as required by state law.

Republican groups said that if the high court doesn’t uphold the ruling, it should at least modify it, saying it doesn’t stand for the vote that ends Tuesday.

The Commonwealth Court ruled in a 3-2 decision that 69 mail ballots with missing or inaccurate dates must be counted in Philadelphia’s two special House elections held in September.

The judges emphasized that they were ruling on elections that had already taken place (in which unopposed candidates were running), but there was uncertainty about how that might apply to upcoming elections. Pennsylvania is the largest swing state in the close presidential race, and its voters also fill seats in the U.S. Senate, three row offices statewide and much of the Legislature.

Rules for mailing ballots in Pennsylvania are common. convicted in state and federal courts since the Legislature allowed all registered voters to vote absentee and vote by mail in 2019, on the eve of the pandemic. In March, the Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the requirement for an exact handwritten date was feasible, and in April changed the design of the envelopes to make it harder for voters to make dating mistakes. State Supreme Court last month rejected trying to waive the demand for visits, and stated on October 5 that this would be don’t revise problem.

The Republican National Committee and the Pennsylvania Republican Party argued that the decision was made too close to Election Day, county election officials should have been given a chance to weigh in, and the state Supreme Court recently issued another ruling on the same topic.

“Without intervention from this court, county boards are thus likely to count undated ballots that the General Assembly determines should not be counted,” they wrote in a document filed Thursday. They cautioned that the single date requirement could be applied differently across the state.

“There is no justification—none—for the majority’s rush to invalidate the demand for a General Assembly date less than a week before the 2024 general election,” they wrote in an emergency declaration.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court gave the other parties until Friday morning to respond.

IN two solutions over the past two months the state Supreme Court upheld the outer envelope date mandate and indicated that the high court does not want existing laws or procedures to change significantly “during the upcoming election.”

The Commonwealth Court majority said that requiring precise outer envelope dates that are not needed to determine whether a ballot arrived on time conflicts with the state’s constitutional provision that elections must be free and equal and that no civil or military authority can interfere with them. elections. “free exercise of the right to vote.”