Public Rights Project – on behalf of a coalition of 34 Pennsylvania county commissioners, councilmembers, and election officials – filed an amicus brief in Baxter v. Philadelphia Board of Elections urging the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court to require the board to count 69 mail-in ballots that were rejected due to a missing date or incorrect handwritten date in a September 2024 special election in Philadelphia, because to reject the ballots based on those dating issues would violate the Pennsylvania Constitution.
The constitutionality of this provision was also the subject of litigation earlier this year. The Commonwealth Court ruled that the date requirement no longer serves a government interest and therefore violates the Pennsylvania Constitution’s clause about administering free and fair elections. The decision was appealed in the state Supreme Court in Black Political Empowerment Project v. Schmidt (“BPEP”). Public Rights Project and this coalition filed an amicus brief at that time urging the court to uphold the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court’s decision to eliminate the requirement to date absentee ballots on the outer envelope. The Supreme Court vacated the Commonwealth Court’s opinion in that case on jurisdictional grounds, not addressing the merits of the challenge.
Signatories for the brief serve a broad range of counties across Pennsylvania: Armstrong, Berks, Bucks, Butler, Cameron, Centre, Chester, Clarion, Clinton, Crawford, Dauphin, Delaware, Erie, Fayette, Indiana, Jefferson, Lebanon, Lehigh, Luzerne, Mercer, Montgomery, Northampton, and Venango.
The new brief builds upon the previous argument made by the coalition in BPEP that the date requirement does not help determine if the ballot was received in a timely manner by the county, nor does it have any bearing on determining voter fraud. Instead, the rule requires election workers to expend additional time and resources to conduct educational outreach about ballots, flag ballots for errors, and notify voters of errors. The brief also makes it clear that although mail-in voting has already started in Pennsylvania, local election officials are more than capable of making administrative changes to accept ballots with dating issues in time to count them in the 2024 General Election.
