Although Pennsylvania law requires voters to sign and date the outer envelope of a mail-in ballot and also instructs counties to “set aside” ballots with missing or incorrect dates, counties should still count those ballots, the 3rd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled this week.
More than 10,000 ballots were discarded in the 2022 general election due to failure to conform with the date requirement, according to the opinion, which stated that “the date requirement seems to hamper rather than facilitate election efficiency. Discarding thousands of ballots every election is not a reasonable trade-off in view of the date requirement’s extremely limited and unlikely capacity to detect and deter fraud.”
The court said it cannot justify Pennsylvania’s practice of discarding “thousands of presumably proper ballots,” just because the envelope is wrong.
Although the decision affirms the lower court’s decision by Judge Susan Paradise Baxter of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania, The Federalist noted that other courts have instructed counties not to count ballots inside faulty envelopes.
For example, just days before the 2024 presidential election, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ordered that mail-in ballots submitted in envelopes with no date or an incorrect date not be counted.
While Democrats have encouraged people to vote by mail ever since the practice was allowed, Republicans have been skeptical about the security of mail-in ballots.
President Donald Trump has declared that he intends to ban mail-in voting with an executive order, a move that Democrats will surely challenge in court.
Josh Findlay, director of the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s National Election Protection Project and the former national director of election integrity for the Republican National Committee, recently explained to The Federalist why mail-in voting is “the least secure method of casting a ballot.”
He stated that “unlike in-person voting, where safeguards such as voter ID verification are standard and supported by a majority of the people, mail-in ballots are susceptible to fraud, misdelivery, and errors. Ballots can be intercepted and fraudulently cast, lost in transit, or even altered without the voter’s knowledge. In addition, signature verification — a key safeguard — is far from foolproof.”
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