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GOP asks SCOTUS to halt Pa. Supreme Court ruling in Butler County provisional ballots case • Pennsylvania Capital-Star [1]
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Date: 2024-10-28 23:02:14+00:00
A Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision dramatically changed the rules on mail-in voting less than two weeks before election day, the national and state GOP committees said on Monday in a filing asking the U.S. Supreme Court to halt its enforcement.
The Republican National Committee (RNC) and the Republican Party of Pennsylvania (RPP) said the case is of “paramount importance,” potentially affecting tens of thousands of votes that could be decisive in the races for president and control of the U.S. Senate.
They asked Justice Samuel A. Alito, who decides on such requests for Pennsylvania, to issue a stay to prevent county election officials from being compelled to count provisional ballots cast by voters whose mail-in ballots are fatally flawed. Alternatively, they asked Alito to order such provisional ballots to be segregated until the U.S. Supreme Court can decide the issue.
The RNC and RPP filed a similar request last week in the state Supreme Court. Alito could decide on the U.S. Supreme Court petition at any time.
The underlying case involves voters from Butler County who learned that their mail-in ballots might not be counted and went to the polls on Election Day where they voted on provisional ballots. The board of elections refused to count the provisional ballots because the state Election Code says that provisional ballots from voters whose mail-in ballots are “timely received” cannot be counted even if the mail-in ballots are rejected.
The state Supreme Court ruled Wednesday in a 4-3 decision that the Butler County Board of Elections erred by refusing to count the provisional ballots. The Election Code requires county elections officials to count provisional ballots if no other ballot is attributable to the voter and provided there are no issues that would disqualify the provisional ballot, Justice Christine Donohue wrote in the majority opinion.
The case is one of several involving Pennsylvania’s vote-by-mail laws that have wended their way through the state appellate courts and now to the U.S. Supreme Court.
In the petition to Alito, the RNC and RPP argue the Pennsylvania Supreme Court majority’s ruling usurps the state Legislature’s authority to direct the appointment of presidential electors and to set the “times, places and manner” for congressional elections.
“This Court bears the constitutional responsibility of ensuring that state courts do not ‘unconstitutionally intrude upon the role specifically reserved to state legislatures by Article I, Section 4, of the Federal Constitution,’” the petition says, citing the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in a 2023 case from North Carolina challenging the power of state courts to decide federal election issues.
Although the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a request to require North Carolina to change its congressional district lines weeks before a primary election, the Pennsylvania case is different because it would simply restore the status quo, the petition argues.
“Restoring that status quo, which existed until the majority’s decision a few days ago, would not cause any voter confusion or chaos or application of new rules. It would simply require election officials to apply the exact same rules for processing provisional ballots that governed before that decision,” the RNC and RPP argue.
They also argue that the Pennsylvania Election Code unambiguously prohibits counting provisional ballots, that the state Supreme Court’s decision is “untenable” and that the court’s intervention is necessary to safeguard the election, in which voting by mail has already commenced.
Without the court’s intervention, counties will begin to canvass provisional ballots on election day, the parties argue.
“Once that happens, it will be impossible to repair election results that have been tainted by illegally counted ballots,” the petition says.
The state Supreme Court decision Wednesday is the latest involving mail-in ballots, which have been the subject of litigation in every election since 2020, when an amendment to the election code first allowed voters to vote by mail without an excuse.
In a pair of decisions on Oct. 5, exactly a month before the election, the court dismissed a pair of cases involving the disqualification of mail-in ballots, saying that deciding the cases so close to the election would risk confusion among voters.
In one case, the court dismissed a request by voting rights groups to block the enforcement of a rule requiring mail-in ballots to bear a handwritten date on the return envelope. In another, it rejected a request by the Republican National Committee and the Republican Party of Pennsylvania to stop county election officials from allowing voters to remedy mistakes on their mail-in ballots that would cause them to be disqualified.
The state Supreme Court agreed, however, to decide whether county election officials must inform voters if their mail-in ballots are disqualified so that voters can challenge the decision.
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