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    • Supreme Court won’t stop PA from counting some provisional ballots
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    Supreme Court won’t stop PA from counting some provisional ballots

    Sakege Posted on

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    He Supreme Court on Friday refused to stop Pennsylvania from counting some provisional ballots in Tuesday’s election, a decision that could affect thousands of votes in the battleground state.

    The court rejected the GOP Emergency Request intervene after the Pennsylvania Supreme Court said voters should be able to cast provisional ballots if they did not place an absentee ballot in the required secrecy sleeve.

    State and national Republicans argued that would give voters an “unauthorized repeat” of “naked ballots” or other errors in mail-in ballots.

    Pennsylvania is possibly the most important of the seven disputed states that will decide the presidential elections on November 5 and surveys show an extremely close race.

    In a joint statement, spokespeople for the Democratic Party and Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign said Republicans have been trying to make it harder to count votes in Pennsylvania and across the country. But the Supreme Court’s decision, Rosemary Boeglin and Michael Tyler said, “confirms that, for every eligible voter, the right to vote means the right to have their vote counted.”

    The state court’s decision arose from a dispute over two votes cast in the Democratic primary. But Republicans said it would affect how votes are counted on Tuesday.

    Justice Samuel Alito called the issue “a matter of considerable importance.”

    But in a brief written comment joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, Alito said that suspending the state court’s order – as Republicans requested – “would not prevent the consequences they fear” because the order applied only to the two primary voting.

    Alito took no position on the validity of Republican’s legal argument. None of the other judges offered their opinion or said how they voted.

    Provisional ballots are reserved on Election Day and counted later if officials confirm the voter’s eligibility.

    State law allows provisional votes if the voter “did not cast any other votes, including absentee ballots, in the election.” It also says that a provisional ballot “will not be counted if the county board of elections timely receives the voter’s absentee or mail-in ballot.”

    But if an absentee ballot is invalidated, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court reasoned, then it was neither cast nor received on time.

    Republicans argued that that decision effectively rewrote election law, something only lawmakers can do.

    Democrats and voting rights groups countered that the court simply made a routine interpretation of a state law, which is within the bounds of judicial review. That puts it outside the bounds of federal court involvement, they argue.

    They also said Republicans did not have the legal right to seek help from the U.S. Supreme Court because the dispute originated in the Democratic primary. And they argued that Republicans were improperly asking the court to impose new rules on the cusp of elections for all of the state’s 67 county election boards when only one was involved in the case.

    Two voters sued the Butler County Board of Elections for rejecting their provisional ballots in the April primary after their mail-in ballots were invalidated because they lacked security sleeves.

    Most counties in the state allow voters to cast provisional ballots in that circumstance or fix their ballot by mail. according to the ACLU of Pennsylvania.

    But a county judge upheld the board’s decision not to count the votes, saying the law places the responsibility on voters to properly submit their ballots.

    Two state appeals courts disagreed, although their decisions were not unanimous.

    The divided Pennsylvania Supreme Court said it makes no sense that lawmakers would want to “totally disenfranchise a voter because of an error with their return package for no discernible purpose.”

    “The General Assembly wrote the Election Code for the purpose of allowing citizens to exercise their right to vote, not for the purpose of creating obstacles to voting,” said Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice Christine Donohue. wrote for the majority 4-3.

    Sakege
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