A Pennsylvania court ruled to halt the enforcement of a rule requiring mail-in ballots to include accurate, handwritten dates on the envelopes used to submit them.
The ruling will likely save thousands of ballots from being thrown out because of violations.
“The refusal to count undated or incorrectly dated but timely mail ballots submitted by otherwise eligible voters because of meaningless and inconsequential paperwork errors violates the fundamental right to vote” in the Pennsylvania Constitution, Judge Ellen Ceisler wrote in the majority opinion, siding with the left-leaning groups that sued three months ago.
The court ruled 4-1 that tossing out voters’ ballots violates the state constitution’s clause that addresses “free and equal” elections. Judge Patricia McCullough was the only judge to dissent, saying that the majority showed “a wholesale abandonment of common sense,” ignored more than a century of legal precedent, and rewrote the 2019 state law that expanded mail-in voting.
“I must wonder whether walking into a polling place, signing your name, licking an envelope, or going to the mailbox can now withstand the majority’s newly minted standard,” McCullough wrote.