The US Supreme Court announced on January 21st that it will not hear arguments challenging Pennsylvania’s hand-written date requirement on mail-in ballots.
The Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge from Pennsylvania voting and civil rights groups over the state’s requirement for all mail-in voting ballots to contain a handwritten date. The civil rights groups objected that the mandate is unnecessary and leads to disqualification of legitimate ballots. A lower appeals court had previously upheld a ruling that did not find any constitutional violations in the mandate, leading to another challenge that the Supreme Court also opted not to hear.
Opponents of the state law contended that it violated certain provisions of the 1964 Voting Rights Act, and resulted in sometimes discriminatory objections of otherwise legally-obtained ballots. The Philadelphia-based 3rd US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 2024 that while the date requirement “serves little apparent purpose”, it was not a violation of the Voting Rights Act, since the act does not specifically mention “how a qualified voter must cast his ballot for it to be counted.”
Shortly before the announcement from the US Supreme Court, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court granted an argument to a similar law objecting to the valid date requirement on outer envelopes, marking the first time it has agreed to hear a challenge related to mail-in ballots. The law was in relation to a Republican National Convention challenge prior to the 2024 Presidential Election, arguing that mail-in ballots that did not have proper date and time stamps on the outer envelopes should not be counted for the November 5th election. The US Supreme Court granted a stay in favor of the RNC, which upheld the ruling. It cited the previous stay in its decision to not hear new arguments related to any similar cases.
The issue of mail-in ballots became highly contested during the 2020 Presidential Election, when the COVID-19 pandemic led to record numbers of mail-in and absentee ballots in many states. President Trump – who lost his reelection bid in 2020 only to win again 2024 – blamed reported irregularities in mail-in ballots for his election defeat. He lost the state of Pennsylvania in 2020 but flipped its 19 electoral votes in 2024 to aid his victory over Kamala Harris. Since the start of 2024, more than 12 different lawsuits have involved disputes over the mail-in date requirement, but most have been struck down.
In October 2024, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court previously rejected a challenge from voting rights groups that sought to change the way mail-in ballots were marked in time for early voting in the presidential election.
Prior to the 2022 midterm elections, the commonwealth Supreme Court ruled in favor of a similar challenge, which led to the disqualification of 10,000 mail-in ballots that did not have proper date form but were submitted on time.
