The Supreme Court of the United States announced on Tuesday that it will not hear an appeal from civil rights organizations that seeks to invalidate Pennsylvania’s dating requirement for mail ballots.
This rule has resulted in the invalidation of thousands of votes in each of the most recent elections and has been a central legal battle over voting in the key swing state.
Several organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Pennsylvania State Conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and others, have asserted that the requirement is in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prevents states from denying the right to vote due to an error that is not significant.
Attempts have been made by Republicans to make the dating requirement mandatory.
The Supreme Court of the United States declined to comment on the appeal that was filed by the groups; nevertheless, this decision comes after the highest court in Pennsylvania stated on Friday that it will hear a separate lawsuit challenging the dating requirement.
In this action, which also involves the American Civil Liberties Union, the requirement is challenged on the grounds that it violates the Free and Equal Elections Clause of the Pennsylvania Constitution.
Act 77, which was passed in 2019, specified technical restrictions such as returning the mail ballot envelope with the correct date. Additionally, the state of Pennsylvania implemented a no-excuse mail voting system during the same year.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and other organizations have been engaged in considerable litigation for a number of years, with the goal of ensuring that the votes of thousands of people who have returned their ballots in a timely manner but with an incorrect or missing date are nonetheless tallied.
In the days leading up to the election in November, the highest court in Pennsylvania issued many orders mandating that the date requirement be adhered to.
After some time had passed, it reprimanded local Democratic authorities who had sought to disobey the judgment of the court by counting the ballots that were disputed.
Numerous reasons have been presented by civil rights organizations in opposition to the dating requirement; nevertheless, the majority of them maintain that the requirement is worthless because election administrators timestamp mail ballots as soon as they are received.
“All agree these voters are qualified, that they filled out and returned their ballots on time, and that the handwritten date has nothing to do with confirming voters’ identities or qualifications, determining timeliness, or preventing fraud. In other words, all agree the error is immaterial,” the ACLU stated in its high court petition.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) also informed the justices that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s review of the other action could “result in binding statewide precedent that effectively resolves the issue in this litigation.”
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Until the other case is determined, the American Civil Liberties Union argued that the justices need to either either hold the petition or send it back to a lower court.
As a result of the fact that the Civil Rights Act of 1964’s materiality rule only applies to registration forms and not actual ballots, the Republican National Committee requested that the lower court’s decision be upheld. This finding determined that the dating requirement did not violate the constitutionality of the act.
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“Petitioners again challenge the date requirement but can invoke zero appellate precedent supporting, much less adopting, their reading of the Provision. No surprise, then, that Petitioners do not identify any split in appellate authority. That is reason enough to deny their petition and, at a minimum, allow the question presented to percolate in the lower courts before taking it up,” the RNC stated in court filings.
