GOP Wins One, Loses Another in Spats Over Absentee Voting

For those following the constant back and forth about election integrity, two rulings of note from courts in Pennsylvania and New York have dropped this week.The Pennsylvania supreme court sided with Republicans, issuing a much anticipated answer in a dispute over undated or incorrectly dated envelopes. In New York, courts sided with Democrats in maintaining Covid as a reason to vote by mail.The high court in Harrisburg decided that absentee ballots with incorrectly dated envelopes must be separated from other ballots and not counted — at least for the time being — in an order issued Tuesday.“We hereby direct that the Pennsylvania county boards of elections segregate and preserve any ballots contained in undated or incorrectly dated outer envelopes,” the court wrote.The decision came from a court split down the middle, three to three, with the bench being one justice short of the normal seven after the chief justice, David “Max” Baer, died earlier this year.This is the reason for the court’s cautious directions to simply separate the ballots rather than to disqualify them entirely, as there could be a future ruling either allowing them to be counted or requiring that they are not.The case centers around arguments from Republicans that ballots with incorrectly dated envelopes shouldn’t count, and arguments from Democrats that tossing ballots based purely on the date on the envelope would be voter disenfranchisement.Opinions of the individual justices have not been released, and the matter may not yet be settled because the case could be brought to federal court in the coming days.This was a reversal of a 2020 decision concerning a similar issue, when the court decided that such ballots should count. The tie-breaking vote then argued that erroneously completed ballots should count in 2020 but not in future elections.Earlier this year, however, a federal appeals court ruled that such ballots should count because the date on the envelope is normally irrelevant to whether it is counted.State law in Pennsylvania requires that ballots be received before the polls close regardless of what date is listed on the envelope a ballot is returned in.The decision, if it stands, would mark a win for Pennsylvania Republicans, who have argued since the 2020 election cycle that undated ballots should not be counted.Although it’s unknown how many undated ballots were counted in the 2020 election, counties reported some 860 such ballots in the state primaries earlier this month.According to the United States Elections Project, nearly a million mail-in ballots have already been returned this year, with nearly 71 percent of them being returned by registered Democrats, meaning disqualification of mail-in votes would likely disqualify more Democratic votes.In New York, another procedural dispute over the counting of mail-in ballots was resolved, with the court ruling in favor of Democratic arguments that voters may continue to use Covid as an excuse for absentee voting.The court was sympathetic to Democrats’ arguments that changing the rules mid-election would “lead to some voters being treated differently than others,” ruling against Republicans who brought the case.The court also found that those who brought the case “offered no valid basis for this avoidable delay” in elections procedures after waiting six months between the extension of the Covid-era measure and filing their suit.Following the ruling, the state’s Democratic Party chairman, Jay Jacobs, said, “We applaud this decision.” Republicans did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the case.

GOP Wins One, Loses Another in Spats Over Absentee Voting

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