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.
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