Thousands of Pennsylvania votes are not counted each election cycle due to mistakes in dating the ballot envelope.
On Tuesday, a Pennsylvania court ruled that undated or incorrectly dated mail-in ballots must be counted in elections.
The United States 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court ruling earlier this week. It found that a previous law rejecting undated or wrongly dated ballots violates the First and 14th Amendments. The decision was unanimous.
In the 3-0 decision, the court wrote, “The date requirement imposes a burden on Pennsylvanians’ constitutional right to vote. And it culminates in county election boards discarding thousands of ballots each time an election is held. The date requirement will not protect against the vast majority of attempts at voter fraud.”
The appeal was heard by Judges Patty Schwartz, Arianna J. Freedman, and D. Brooks Smith.
The appeal asked the 3rd Circuit to determine if the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’s requirement that mail-in ballots arriving undated or misdated be discarded complies with the state’s Constitution.
“The date requirement seems to hamper rather than facilitate election efficiency. By its nature, it fails to add solemnity to the process of voting. And 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,” wrote Judge Smith in the opinion.
“Because of the Commonwealth’s date requirement, an inadvertent typographical error or a flipped number or even a stray pen mark in the date field will remove the ballot contained within the return envelope from consideration. And the voter may never be the wiser,” Smith continued.
“Casting a ballot and having it counted are central to the democratic process. The date requirement does not play a role in election administration, nor does it contribute an added measure of solemnity beyond that created by a signature,” the opinion read.
“Weighing these interests against the burden on voters, we are unable to justify the Commonwealth’s practice of discarding ballots contained in return envelopes with missing or incorrect dates that has resulted in the disqualification of thousands of presumably proper ballots,” it said.
Under Pennsylvania law, voters are required to write the date on the return envelope for their mail ballot to be counted. Thousands of voters each election do not have their vote counted due to errors with dating the envelope, such as skipping the date or writing in their birthdate.
