Mailed ballots that arrive on time but in envelopes without dates handwritten by Pennsylvania voters should be counted, a federal judge ruled Tuesday in a case that’s likely to end up before the U.S. Supreme Court.
The ruling by U.S. District Judge Susan Paradise Baxter is expected to be appealed to the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals before it ultimately reaches the high court, whose final word on what are often referred to as “undated ballots” may help determine the outcome of the 2024 presidential race and other key upcoming elections in the swing state.
Republicans will take all measures possible to reduce the number of votes, because they are more likely to lose when people vote. It’s that simple.
If you look through the material provided to people assigned to manually tally votes, they make it very clear that as long as the intent of the voter is clearly indicated (eg, they filled in one bubble, then drew an X through it, filled in another bubble and circled it and wrote the word THIS with an arrow pointing to it, you’re supposed to count the THIS vote rather than throw it away as a spoiled ballot.
Here, the postmark is a sufficient indicator that the ballot was submitted on time.
If the ballot arrived on time, why should it matter what date is hand-written on it? Our state doesn’t even require that, just a signature to determine that the person voting is the person registered.
Because then Republicans can justify throwing it out if it doesn’t favor them. It doesn’t have to make sense as long as they can have it declared legal.
That’s the thing though… the date is on the outside of the envelope. They would be discarding ballots blindly. Makes no sense.
They aren’t really discarding them blindly though. There’s currently a preference among democrats to use mail in voting compared to Republicans. It used to be the other way around, but many Republicans, Trump especially, continue to tell their followers not to use mail in voting. So yes some of the votes they throw out will be republican votes, but more will be democratic. So throwing them all out throws out more democratic votes than Republicans and helps them. Similarly in states where democrats are making more use of early in person or drop off voting, republicans are trying to restrict those methods.
Republicans are constantly trying to implement “fair” rules that disenfranchise many voters but are blatantly crafted to proportionally decrease democratic votes more than Republican ones. Another good example is Texas’s ridiculous rule of one ballot drop off box per county. Meaning the small rural counties that vote heavily republican get one drop box, but there’s less people so this isn’t too much of a problem. Meanwhile, heavily democratic Harris County (containing Houston) with 4.8 million people, more than a lot of entire states, is only allowed one single ballot drop off box too. I think you can see how this “fair” rule that applies to everyone is crafted to hurt democratic voters more, like all the republican voter suppression efforts. They look for any discrepancy between how republicans and democrats access voting, and then pounce on those.
You have to love how the SCOTUS GOP branch sees no problem with this because they don’t see it as a violation of the Voting Rights Act. They miss, however, whether this requirement serves any actual purpose other than to create an artificial barrier to participation.
But…but…but…sTaTeS rIgHtS!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Mailed ballots that arrive on time but in envelopes without dates handwritten by Pennsylvania voters should be counted, a federal judge ruled Tuesday in a case that’s likely to end up before the U.S. Supreme Court.
The plaintiffs in this pair of lawsuits — including the Pennsylvania State Conference of the NAACP and the Democratic campaign committees for U.S. House of Representatives and Senate candidates — argue that ballots in return envelopes without any handwritten date or with an incorrect one should not be disqualified from the 2022 midterm elections and future races in Pennsylvania.
While those handwritten dates are required by Pennsylvania state law, they are not used to confirm whether a person is allowed to vote.
Counties have included ballots arriving in undated or misdated return envelopes in final vote tallies for past elections.
The Republican National Committee and other GOP groups have joined the case in opposition to counting ballots without handwritten dates or those that are misdated.
Three of the high court’s conservative justices — Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch — have indicated that they’re not convinced that disqualifying ballots for missing handwritten dates violates the Civil Rights Act.
The original article contains 353 words, the summary contains 196 words. Saved 44%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
