The Supreme Court on Friday rejected a Republican-backed lawsuit that could have disenfranchised thousands of Pennsylvanians who have chosen to vote by mail in the tightly contested state.
In Republican National Committee v. Genser, the court affirmed an October 23 Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling regarding procedures for mail-in ballots that are not sealed properly.
At issue is a state law saying that a mailed ballot is void if it is only put in the outer “declaration” envelope but not the inner “secrecy” envelop as well. According to the law, a missing secrecy envelope means the ballot is deemed “naked,” at which point a voter is informed that they must go to the polls on Election Day to cast a provisional ballot.
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The case was originally brought by two Democratic voters who cast mail-in ballots in the Pennsylvania primary earlier this year. After being told that those ballots weren‘t accepted because they were missing the secrecy envelope, they voted in person. Yet their provisional ballots weren’t counted, either.
The RNC had argued in favor of putting on hold the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s ruling that those provisional ballots be counted until they could file a petition for review. The Supreme Court rejected that claim in a brief unsigned order.
In a press release, the American Civil Liberties Union praised the Supreme Court’s decision.
“A petty error that is irrelevant to a person’s eligibility to vote should never interfere with the counting of ballots, and provisional ballots are a decades-old failsafe, a back up, for voters,” said Witold Walczak, legal director of the ACLU of Pennsylvania.
“We’re grateful that the RNC’s argument has failed and that voters can count on provisional ballots as a way to make sure that their vote counts.”
More than 1.6 million Pennsylvanians have already voted by mail, with more registered Democrats than Republicans doing so. According an Associated Press review of state records, about 9,000 such ballots were missing either a secrecy envelope, a signature, or a handwritten date.
In a separate ruling Friday, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court denied voting rights advocates' plea to ensure that mail-in ballots with an inaccurate or missing handwritten date on the “declaration” envelope be counted.
