Pennsylvania’s Commonwealth Court ruled 4-1 last week that voters fialing to include an accurate, handwritten date on the envelopes used to submit their mail-in ballots should not have their votes disqualified, though the state’s law requires it. The majority argued that the state constitution’s clause about “free and equal” elections precludes disqualification for such a “technicality.”
The ruling will probably keep several thousand Pennsylvania votes cast by careless morons from being thrown out in the upcoming election, which is expected to be especially close in that state.
“The refusal to count undated or incorrectly dated but timely mail ballots submitted by otherwise eligible voters because of meaningless and inconsequential paperwork errors violates the fundamental right to vote” in the Pennsylvania Constitution, wrote Judge Ellen Ceisler for the majority. The opinion made victors of the left-supporting groups who sued to loosen some more voting requirements.
Many more Democrats than Republicans vote by mail in Pennsylvania. (Why would that be, I wonder?) The plaintiffs included the Black Political Empowerment Project, POWER Interfaith, Make the Road Pennsylvania, OnePA Activists United, New PA Project Education Fund, Casa San José, Pittsburgh United, League of Women Voters of Pennsylvania, and Common Cause Pennsylvania, with the ACLU of Pennsylvania and the Democratic Party joining in as well. “No one should lose their vote over a simple human error that has no relevance to whether or not the ballot was received on time,” said the ACLU’s state executive director.
Slope, meets Slip. In her dissent, Judge Patricia McCullough wrote that the majority showed “a wholesale abandonment of common sense,” ignoring more than a century of legal precedent and rewriting the 2019 state law that dramatically expanded mail-in voting. “I must wonder whether walking into a polling place, signing your name, licking an envelope, or going to the mailbox can now withstand the majority’s newly minted standard,” McCullough said.
The decision reminded me of the Democratic Party’s argument in the Florida hanging chad fiasco of 2000 that a computer card ballot where some dolt who couldn’t figure out the voting process had scrawled “I want to vote for Gore!” should be counted. At the time, I wrote on the now dead in its cyber cubicle Ethics Scoreboard, “If that’s a vote, why not count the vote of someone running into the polling place and shouting, ‘I vote for Al Gore’? Is the Democratic Party’s position now that all laws are just suggestions that can be ignored or rewritten when the they interfere with their party’s objectives?”
But I don’t want to unduly influence your vote on..
…today’s Labor Day Weekend Ethics Quiz, which is...
“Is the Pennsylvania court’s decision fair and responsible?”
Ethics Alarms 
I feel a need for additional information before finalizing my opinion.
Specifically, are the envelopes containing mailed ballots postmarked during their processing by the USPS?
I ask because I have more than once protected something I’d written with a “common law copyright”; that’s mailing myself a copy and leaving the envelope sealed in order to use the Post Office’s date and time stamp on the postage cancellation as proof of when I’d written a piece should there be a dispute over authorship.
I never needed that precaution but if an envelope has that official evidence of electoral timeliness I’d consider that acceptable in lieu of a handwritten date. And even an improvement.
I would tend to agree if and only if the ballot has a postmark before the end of voting but the law as written should be followed. This not the court’s role to rewrite a law. What can now happen is that ballots supposedly from drop boxes no longer need to be dated. The same groups will argue the disenfranchisement claim if boxes of ballots from drop boxes are suddenly found during the period they allow for the postal service to deliver postmarked mail and they are disqualified because they lack any verifiable date.
What bothers me is that the groups suing could have petitioned the legislature to fix what they perceived as a problem before going to court.
In 2020 a PA court allowed the Secretary of State of PA to change procedures in violation of the PA constitution. You have to wonder why the legislature is unwilling to exercise its power and obligations.
You might save postage and get a stronger case if you use notary. Many banks let you use their licenced staff as a free customer perk.
Mailing themselves an unsealed envelope that they later enclose a “prediction” is a common magician’s ploy.
Don’t think they’ll go for their notary reading “War and Peace” but they might note a cryptographic hash of the work.
I’d think a postmark would be a better choice — it makes me wonder why the legislature did not choose it in 2019.
But otherwise, I don’t think it generally is the court’s job to rewrite the laws.
Last time, the court ruled that they could count ballots that arrived AFTER the deadline, but weren’t postmarked with a date, but those votes had to be kept separarate until the final ruling. Of course, they actually rolled them into the total. When they were told that the votes weren’t permissible, they told the court to shove it, that they couldn’t be backed out. The court took it and shrinked back to their hole. Why in the world are out votes allowed to be handled and transported by a union that has endorsed one of the candidates?
Remember, the post office can postmark letters without a date. None of my credit card bills have a date, so I can’t prove they mailed them after the due date.
It seems to me like regressive progressives are intentionally chipping away at the outer edges of our election laws and processes in their efforts to undermine everything that makes the United States of America what it is. How long do you think it’s going to take progressive morons to argue that the citizenship requirement for voting in federal elections is anti-human rights (or something like that) and should be ignored because all immigrants have to live under the same laws and regulations as everyone else in this country, therefore they should be able to vote for those who create our laws?
Should we allow these progressive morons to gain total power and wreck the United States so we can get the inevitable civil war that they are pushing us towards underway? Remember, it’s progressives that are openly calling for a revolution as part of their protests across the USA and the faster it gets underway the sooner the patriots supporting the Constitution can blot out the anti-Constitutionalists and send them back under their rocks of absurdity. No I’m not advocating for civil war.
I don’t see why some handwritten date changes anything. They could write any date they wanted on there. If its received by the posted date or (I guess depending on the wording) posted by the posted date, then it should be accepted.
I don’t know what the legal precedent is Judge patricia talks about, so maybe that matters too.
Ok it is the day after Election Day and all of a sudden several boxes of ballots from drop boxes are found before the deadline to receive mail in ballots. If those ballots affect the outcome of a race but because they were claimed to be found in government provided drop boxes then we can expect the same groups that use the courts instead of getting legislation to claim disqualification disenfranchises the people who they say cast these ballots .
We need to push back on the disenfranchisement claim. Failure to follow directions should lead to disqualification. It is not discriminatory if it is applied to any ballot. Furthermore, a claim that it disproportionately affects minorities cannot be proven because ballots are anonymous and the outer envelope only carries a name and not a race of the voter.
Failure to follow directions should lead to disqualification.
Only if those directions serve a compelling government interest. The dating provision does not.
It would be like not accepting your vote because you have sloppy handwriting when you sign your name in the voting book after you show your ID.
The compelling public interest is to ensure elections are devoid of potential fraud. A date is an element of the process. Imagine if a thousand undated votes are found after the deadline. How do you get the loser who lose by a small number of votes to believe the election was not fixed after the fact. It was Jimmy Carter who said that mail in ballots are rife with fraud.
Thor has been relentlessly wrong-headed in all of his comments, and was on the way to being banned when he cut out in September. His last comment evoked the Statue of Liberty as having statutory relevance regarding illegal immigrants. Anyone who can’t follow the instruction on how to vote, which are typically clear enough for the average 11-year-old, is too dim to vote anyway. Call it voting Darwinism.
In the example above it said mail-in, not drop boxes. If chain of custody can not be establish for drop boxes, then they shouldn’t count. I don’t even understand how they could count for that reason alone.
Wasn’t pennsylvania also the state that decided keeping observers 50 feet away from the vote counters was perfectly acceptable since the law didn’t specify a distance? Who care’s if they can’t reasonably verify everything, they were technically able to observer…
The answer is yes.
The date on the outer part of the ballot envelopes isnt used to determine the timeliness of a ballot, a voter’s eligibility to vote, or fraud. So the “ provisions serve no compelling government interest.”
The dating provisions (not to count legitimate votes) was unconstitutional since it interfered with their right to vote and served no legitimate purpose (like preventing fraud, who the voter is, etc)