Defeated Democratic Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey published a Monday opinion piece in which he explained his refusal to concede his race and endorsed counting undated or misdated ballots just before the state supreme court shot down Democrats’ attempts to do so.
The Associated Press, which has called the Senate race for McCormick, projects that McCormick leads Casey by approximately 17,400 votes out of more than 6.5 million cast as of Monday afternoon, triggering an automatic recount by state law. Several counties in Pennsylvania are moving to count deficient ballots, and Casey wrote in his Monday piece that throwing out undated or misdated ballots is akin to “disenfranchising thousands of voters,” just hours before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court flatly rejected the push to count undated or misdated ballots.
“Undated mail ballots have long been at issue in Pennsylvania’s elections. Gov. Wolf’s administration advocated to have these ballots count, as has Secretary of State Al Schmidt, and even my opponent himself. The Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania has ruled twice in 2024 alone that throwing out these ballots violates Pennsylvania’s constitution,” Casey wrote. “At its core, this is a debate about the constitutionality of disenfranchising thousands of voters due to a requirement that has no bearing on a voters’ eligibility and has no impact in deterring fraud. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has been asked to take up this issue and come to a resolution for a question that has been at issue long before the 2024 election, and which will reverberate far beyond this race.”
The state Supreme Court published a filing Monday afternoon — just after PennLive published Casey’s op-ed — stating that “mail-in and absentee ballots that fail to comply with the Pennsylvania Election Code SHALL NOT BE COUNTED for the purposes of the election held on Nov. 5, 2024.” The state Supreme Court’s ruling applies to every county in the state.
Officials in Bucks, Montgomery, Philadelphia and Centre Counties had moved to try to count deficient ballots as Casey’s race heads to a recount, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer. One commissioner in Bucks County, Democrat Diane Ellis-Marseglia, said Thursday that she does not care for existing legal precedent on the issue of whether ballots count as she voted to count them in her county.
“Following our latest [Republican National Committee (RNC)] lawsuit, today the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled yet again that undated ballots CANNOT BE COUNTED,” RNC Chairman Michael Whatley said in a post on X after the ruling. “No more excuses. Election officials in Bucks, Montgomery, Philadelphia, and other counties have absolutely no choice but to reject illegal ballots. We will hold them to it.”
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