Courts delivered wins for Pennsylvania voters Friday in two different right-wing disenfranchisement efforts.
One ruling ensured that undated or wrongly dated mail-in ballots will be counted, while the other rejected a far-right bid to purge more than 277,000 from the state’s voter rolls.
First, the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals denied a request by Pennsylvania Attorney General Dave Sunday (R), on behalf of the state, to halt a recent federal court ruling that Pennsylvania must count undated or wrongly dated mail-in ballots.
In March, a federal judge ruled that a state law that allowed county boards of elections to reject undated or wrongly dated mail-in ballots violated the First and 14th Amendments.
The ruling stemmed from a lawsuit originally filed in 2022 by three Pennsylvania voters, along with the campaign of U.S. Sen. John Fetterman (D), the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, challenging the state’s instructions to county boards of elections that any mail-in ballot that’s timely cast but either missing a date or containing the wrong date on the outer return envelopes should not be counted.
The plaintiffs argued that not counting undated mail-in ballots violates the Materiality Provision of the Civil Rights Act because it denies an individual the right to vote for a reason that is not material to determining that individual’s eligibility. They also argued that rejecting undated mail-in ballots also violates the First and 14th Amendments by placing an undue burden on the right to vote.
The RNC and the other GOP groups intervened in the lawsuit to defend Pennsylvania’s mail-in ballot law, which became a major focal point in a slew of lawsuits in the aftermath of the 2024 senate race between Sen. David McCormick (R) and former Sen. Bob Casey (D). Three Pennsylvania counties decided to count undated mail-in ballots, despite two previous Pennsylvania Supreme Court orders in similar lawsuits that temporarily halted all counties from counting such ballots. McCormick and the RNC sued in all 67 Pennsylvania counties to ensure that no undated mail-in ballots would be counted in the 2024 election.
After the federal judge’s ruling in March, the state, RNC and the other GOP plaintiffs appealed the decision to the 3rd Circuit. The appeal remains ongoing, but today’s order ensures that counties will count wrongly dated and undated ballots during this month’s primary.
Also on Friday, a Pennsylvania district court judge dismissed a lawsuit by the right-wing 1789 Foundation to have hundreds of thousands of voters purged from Pennsylvania’s voter rolls.
The 1789 Foundation, also known as Citizen_AG, filed a lawsuit in October against Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt (R) claiming Schmidt failed to maintain voter rolls in line with the National Voter Registration Act. The group wanted the court to force Pennsylvania to remove 277,000 registrants who did not respond to confirmation notices in the 2020 general election cycle removed from the voter rolls.
District Court judge Robert Mariani dismissed the 1789 Foundation’s lawsuit on the grounds that the organization lacked standing to bring the case in the first place.