An already messy battle in Pennsylvania over mail-in ballots stepped up on Friday, with the NAACP and an alliance of different voting rights group submitting a lawsuit to insist sure votes needs to be counted. The difficulty at hand is whether or not a state regulation says that mail-in votes might be counted if they’ve a legitimate date written on the surface of the envelope they arrive in—no matter whether or not they arrive on time.
Final week, the Pennsylvania Supreme Courtroom deadlocked over whether or not the regulation violated voting protections within the Civil Rights Act, however they did vote to put aside the mail-in ballots that arrive with out the correct date. That call arose from a lawsuit filed by the Republican Nationwide Fee looking for to restrict the mail-in ballots that may very well be counted.
The NAACP’s lawsuit says the choice to put aside and presumably not rely these ballots that lack the proper date signifies that doubtlessly hundreds of votes received’t be counted over what the lawsuit describes as “a meaningless technicality” and a “trivial paperwork error.” The presence of the proper date on the surface of the envelope a poll arrives in has nothing to do with the validity of the vote inside, the lawsuit argues.
Pennsylvania regulation says that mail-in ballots might be despatched at any level, and the native county board of elections is liable for deciding whether or not they arrive on time. The board then stamps eligible ballots with a date indicating it was well timed—signifies that “the presence or absence of a handwritten date on the envelope is totally immaterial to figuring out whether or not the poll was well timed obtained, a lot much less to assessing a voter’s {qualifications}.”
The difficulty is especially vital in Pennsylvania, the place the battle for the open US Senate seat between John Fetterman and Mehmet Oz is a toss-up, in response to polls. Oz beat his major opponent by lower than 1,000 votes within the GOP major earlier this yr. Previous to the 2020 election, mail-in voting was typically favored by Republican voters, however former president Donald Trump attacked the strategy, saying it led to fraud. Whereas within the final election, the variety of voters in Pennsylvania who voted by mail was evenly cut up between Republicans and Democrats, this yr 70 % of requests for mail-in ballots got here from registered Democrats.