Philly Leader

Gina Swoboda, executive director of the Voter Reference Foundation, recently expressed concern over a federal appeals court ruling that said Pennsylvania mail-in ballots submitted without a date on the envelope last year should be counted.

"This decision will have a terrible impact on voter confidence," Swoboda said in a statement. "By allowing undated mail ballots received after Election Day to be counted, the court is in effect extending Election Day indefinitely and preventing the electorate from having both certainty in the results and an end to the election itself."

On May 20, a federal appeals court said election ballots submitted by mail without a date should still be counted in Pennsylvania, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. This ruling provides an answer to the question before the three-judge panel in Philadelphia: the 257 undated mail-in ballots in Lehigh County from last November's general election should be counted, the story said.  

State law requires voters to sign and date the outside mailing envelope upon returning their mail ballots, and state courts have held that the requirement indicated any undated ballots must be rejected, the Inquirer reported. However, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit judges declared Friday that the date requirement in state law is immaterial under the Civil Rights Act, meaning it can’t be used as a reason to reject ballots.

The Inquirer points out that the question of whether to count undated mail ballots has been one of several issues in Pennsylvania's legal and political war. Last year, Republican lawmakers threatened to impeach Philadelphia elections officials over the matter. The current case has drawn court filings from top Republican state lawmakers on one side and the U.S. Department of Justice on the other.            

The court issued a judgment and said an opinion would come later, so the full extent of the decision’s impact is currently unclear. But based on the order, lawyers from both parties have said the path is now clear for counties to count the undated mail ballots they were prepared to reject this election, according to the Inquirer.

"Accordingly, there is no basis on this record to refuse to count undated ballots that have been set aside in the 2021 election for Judge of the Common Pleas of Lehigh County,” the judgment reads.