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A federal judge ruled<\/a> Monday that Pennsylvania must count undated or wrongly dated mail-in ballots, finding that a previous law rejecting such ballots violated the First and 14th Amendments.\u00a0<\/p>\n The ruling stems from a lawsuit, originally filed <\/a>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\u2019s instructions to county boards of elections that any mail-in ballot that\u2019s timely cast but either missing a date or containing the wrong date on the outer return envelopes should not be counted.\u00a0<\/p>\n In the lawsuit, the plaintiffs argued that not counting undated mail-in ballots violates the Materiality Provision of the Civil Rights Act<\/a> because it denies an individual the right to vote for a reason that is not material to determining that individual\u2019s eligibility. The plaintiffs argued that the date requirement is immaterial because \u201cPennsylvania law determines voter eligibility based on the date of the election\u2014rather than the date of marking the ballot\u2014[so] the Date Instruction provides no information about whether a voter is qualified.\u201d<\/p>\n The plaintiffs 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n In her ruling<\/a>, District Court Judge Susan Paradise Baxter, who was appointed by President Donald Trump in his first term, found that the state didn\u2019t violate the Materiality Provision, citing a previous federal court ruling that found a date requirement on mail-in ballots doesn\u2019t violate that particular provision of the Civil Rights Act.\u00a0<\/p>\n But the court in this case found that Pennsylvania did violate the First and 14th Amendments \u201cby imposing impermissible burdens on Pennsylvanians\u2019 fundamental right to vote\u2014burdens that are not justified by any state interest.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n The issue of counting undated mail-in ballots was also the focal point of a series of post-election lawsuits last year in Pennsylvania, in the hotly contested U.S. Senate race between Sen. David McCormick (R) and former Sen. Bob Casey (D). Three Pennsylvania counties \u2014 Bucks<\/a>, Montgomery<\/a> and Philadelphia<\/a> \u2014 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 Republican National Committee sued<\/a> in all 67 Pennsylvania counties to ensure that no undated mail-in ballots would be counted in the 2024 election. After the state Supreme Court\u2019s ruling on the issue in September, there was some ambiguity<\/a> on how it would affect the November general election, which is why some\u00a0 boards of elections went ahead with counting undated mail-in ballots.<\/strong><\/p>\n With this ruling, Pennsylvania can\u2019t reject any mail-in ballots that have undated or wrongly dated return envelopes. But a similar case is still playing out in state court, with the Pennsylvania Supreme Court set<\/a> to decide if counting such ballots violates the state constitution.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n