Pennsylvania High Court Blocks RNC Challenge on Mail Ballots
Fred Lucas /
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court declined to take a case over a mail-in ballot lawsuit from the Republican National Committee, asserting it would be too close to the November election.
As previously reported in The Daily Signal, the RNC sued the office of Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt for what it says are inconsistent standards for allowing voters to correct—or “cure”—ballots.
Curing is a term used to describe a voter making a mistake on a mail ballot and making a correction.
Pennsylvania, with 19 electoral votes, is one of the seven hotly contested battleground states. The RealClearPolitics polling average shows the state is a tie between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump. In 2020, Democrat Joe Biden beat Republican Trump in the state by just 1%. In 2016, Trump defeated Hillary Clinton by less than 1%.
The state’s high court also declined to hear a case brought by left-leaning organizations against the state requirement that mail ballots have the correct postmark date in order to be counted. This was on the same grounds, that it was too close to the election. Neither case was rejected on the merits, Reuters reported. Both decisions occurred Saturday.
As described in my book “The Myth of Voter Suppression,” the controversy in 2020 in Pennsylvania dealt largely with postmarks and the deadline for absentee ballots.
Earlier this year, Schmidt announced that voters who don’t follow instructions for completing and returning mail-in ballots may cast provisional ballots. The plaintiffs—the RNC and the Pennsylvania Republican Party—argued that voters who choose to vote by mail don’t have the legal right to cure defects in those ballots.
Under Schmidt’s directive, county election officials may adopt what the RNC calls “a patchwork of unlawful curing policies.”
In their lawsuit, the plaintiffs note that the Pennsylvania Constitution says: “All laws regulating the holding of elections by the citizens, or for the registration of electors, shall be uniform throughout the state.”