PA law says mail-in ballots must be signed, dated and received in timely fashion. In a case involving a prior election (and where the ruling would have no bearing on the winner of the election), a federal judge ruled that undated ballots should still be counted. (The ruling observed that ballots are time stamped when received, so no possibility that the undated ballots were created after the election. It also ruled that the date was irrelevant, since ballots with “impossible dates” before the election started or even dates still in the future would be counted. They just had to have a date.)
The PA senate primary is very close. These undated ballots could make the difference. We surely won’t know until around June 7 anyway, since the election is going to be close enough to trigger a mandatory recount.
Only Republicans can vote in the Republican primary in PA, so the Republican party is trying to avoid counting ballots of Republican voters.
Democratic lawyer Marc Elias, who represented the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016 and who pushed a multi-state challenge against voter identification laws, appeared to champion McCormick’s cause.
“My team was literally working on this same lawsuit for the November election,” Elias said on Twitter.
Though, I’ll also guess that Trump-endorsed primary candidates are less likely to get mail-in votes.
Note that there is a Federal law that says you can’t through out votes for “immaterial” failures. That’s probably the basis of the Federal Appeals court ruling.
Fairly easily. It could be a little more complicated if a justice has to recuse himself due to his wife’s interference in an election where mail-in ballots were an issue.
BTW, I think it’s in federal courts only because this was an election for senate. Does the SC have any jurisdiction over whether such votes get counted in the PA gubernatorial primary? Even though it is the same sheet of paper?
A court at some level (federal or state) has ruled that counties can go ahead and count those votes, but the totals must be kept separate in case the final decision is that they should not be included. Very unlikely to happen, but it would be extremely interesting if the results of the disputed ballots are published, and the election outcome is different depending on whether they are included. Best case, result wise, they don’t get included, and the republican candidate is not the one most popular with Republican primary attempted voters.
(or maybe not a court. Possibly just the governor, a Democrat, instructing the counties on how to process ballots)