The Republican National Committee (RNC) asked the Supreme Court on Wednesday to back one of Pennsylvania’s key safeguards for mail-in ballots.
The petition urges the justices to reconsider a lower court’s decision finding the state cannot exclude undated or misdated mail-in ballots from vote counts.
“Pennsylvania’s mail-in ballot dating requirement is a simple, commonsense safeguard that protects the integrity of the state’s elections,” RNC Chairman Joe Gruters said in a statement to the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Counting ballots that are missing basic requirements like a date violate Pennsylvania law and undermine confidence in elections. We urge the Supreme Court to take this case and reaffirm that states can enforce reasonable election rules like Pennsylvania’s date requirements.”
The Third Circuit Court of Appeals held in August that Pennsylvania’s requirement violates the First and Fourteenth Amendments of the Constitution. The full court declined to reconsider the panel’s ruling in October.
“Weighing the burden that practice imposes on Pennsylvanians’ constitutional right to vote against the State’s interest in the practice, the balance of the scales leads us to hold that it does not comply with our Constitution,” the three-judge panel held in August.
Bette Eakin, a voter whose mail-in ballot was rejected during the midterms, sued in 2022 alongside several Democratic party entities. Democratic Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman was part of the original lawsuit filed on Nov. 7, 2022 ,to ensure the counting of undated and misdated ballots.
Dating issues led to more than 10,000 ballots being discarded during the 2022 midterms, the Third Circuit panel noted.
Fetterman defeated Republican candidate Mehmet Oz in 2022 by 4.9%, or 263,752 votes, according to Ballotpedia.
“For a voter with a functioning pen, sufficient ink, and average hand dexterity, this should take less than five seconds,” Judge Emil Bove, a recent Trump appointee who served in the Department of Justice during the early months of the administration, wrote in an October dissent.
READ THE PETITION:
RNC v. Eakin Cert Petition by Katelynn Richardson
Both the Pennsylvania Supreme Court and the Third Circuit have “rejected an array of challenges to the date-requirement aspect of this safeguard” since 2019, the RNC’s petition highlights. The Third Circuit’s most recent panel decision “departs from several precedents” of the Supreme Court and “deepens multiple circuit splits,” the petition states.
“Pennsylvania law mandates that voters who vote by mail fill out, date, and sign a declaration on the ballot-return envelope,” the RNC’s petition states. “This mandate has governed absentee voting for decades and now applies to universal mail voting, which the General Assembly enacted through a bipartisan compromise in 2019.”
If the Supreme Court takes the RNC’s case, it will be one of several election integrity-related cases the justices consider this year.
In January, the Supreme Court held that candidates for office can sue to challenge rules governing vote counting in elections, allowing Republican Illinois Rep. Michael Bost’s lawsuit over a state law permitting mail-in ballots to be counted up to 14 days after Election Day to proceed.
The justices will hear oral arguments for another case in March, Watson v. RNC, considering whether federal law bars states from counting mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day.
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