Pa. judges say rejecting misdated mail-in ballots violates 'fundamental right to vote'

A Pennsylvania judicial panel on Friday ruled that county officials should not toss out mail-in ballots simply for being incorrectly dated, a decision state elections supervisors called a “victory for the fundamental right to vote.”

Commonwealth Court Judge Ellen Ceisler wrote in a majority opinion that the government has a “heavy burden” to justify rejecting a person’s vote — and that a missing or incorrect date on an envelope isn’t a good enough reason.

County elections officials don’t use envelope dates to root out fraud, make sure a ballot was submitted on time or check a voter’s eligibility, she said.

March 2024: Federal appeals court reverses Erie ruling, bans counting of undated Pa. mail-in ballots

“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 recognized in the free and equal elections clause,” Ceisler wrote.

In a dissenting opinion, Judge Patricia McCullough argued that it shouldn’t be too much to ask voters to follow simple balloting procedures, such as properly dating a mail-in envelope. Otherwise, she contended, most any step in the voting process could be considered overly burdensome.

More: Why a Pa. judge says county can't toss mail-in ballots without telling voters

“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,” she wrote, accusing her colleagues of legislating from the bench.

The lawsuit that prompted the ruling was filed earlier this year by the ACLU of Pennsylvania on behalf of nine advocacy organizations, who said the “meaningless requirement” for correctly dated envelopes had deprived voters of their constitutional right to participate in elections.

The mail-in ballots of about 10,000 Pennsylvanians were excluded from the tally in the 2022 general election because of a dating problem, according to the ACLU of Pennsylvania. The group said thousands more were tossed out in April's primary.

The Pennsylvania state department welcomed Friday’s ruling, saying that when elections officials can determine a ballot was sent and received within a legal timeframe, there’s no reason to exclude it for a small technical error.

“This ruling makes clear a voter’s minor error of forgetting to date or misdating a ballot envelope cannot be a cause for disenfranchisement,” the state department posted on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

“Every eligible voter should be able to vote, and we absolutely should not be looking for reasons to toss out people’s votes," said Susan Grobreski, League of Women Voters of Pennsylvania president. We know when ballots are mailed out, we know when they are received by the County, having an extra requirement that doesn’t contribute anything to the validity of the vote risks disenfranchising people for no reason at all.  We welcome this decision."

The Republican National Committee and Pennsylvania Republican Party intervened in the case seeking to have the lawsuit dismissed; many in the GOP have viewed by-mail voting with suspicion since former President Donald Trump in 2020 falsely claimed the system was rife with fraud.

May 2024: Pa. mail-in ballot laws 'not how this should work,' ACLU says. Why they're suing for fixes

Bethany Rodgers is a USA TODAY Network Pennsylvania capital bureau investigative journalist.

This article originally appeared on Beaver County Times: Can PA counties reject misdated mail-in ballots?