Comment Six days after the Pennsylvania Supreme Court invalidated thousands of mail-in ballots in response to a Republican lawsuit, citizens in Philadelphia and elsewhere in this battleground state scrambled to put in substitutes so their votes would be counted on Election Day. Kirby Smith said after he and his wife were told their ballots wouldn’t count because they were missing dates, they stood in line for two hours at Philadelphia City Hall to cast a replacement vote, missing much of their work day. “Oh, I’m going to vote. It’s not an issue,” said Smith, a 59-year-old Democrat who said he faced the court order as part of an effort to keep people from voting. “I will fight back.” Multiple judges have ruled in the past two years that ballots returned in time by eligible Pennsylvania voters should be counted even if they are undated on the outer envelope. Republicans sued in October to reverse that policy, arguing it violated state law. Last Tuesday, they won a favorable ruling from the state Supreme Court, which ordered counties not to count ballots with missing or inaccurate dates. That decision sparked an extensive volunteer effort to make sure voters who had already returned their ballots knew their votes wouldn’t count if they didn’t take action. Nowhere was this effort more pronounced than in Philadelphia. On Saturday, city officials released the names of more than 2,000 voters who had returned defective ballots and urged them to come to City Hall to vote again in the few days left before Election Day. Community activists and volunteers for the Democratic Party and the Working Families Party began calling, texting and knocking on people’s doors to get the message out. On Monday, the line to hold a replacement vote at City Hall spilled outside and into the building’s courtyard as volunteers provided snacks and bottled water, voters and activists said. “I’m lucky. I could wait in line and do that,” said Melissa Sherwood, a 25-year-old Democrat who works from home. “Some people who don’t have that luxury probably took one look at the line and said no there is a way”. Penina Bernstein said she was thousands of miles away in Colorado when she found out — from friends and strangers who contacted her via Facebook — that her ballot was undated and wouldn’t count. He immediately made plans to return to Pennsylvania to vote. “I’m flying home tonight and I’ll be there to fix it tomorrow because my voice will not be silenced by voter suppression,” said Bernstein, 40, who added that she is not wealthy and made the trip at considerable expense. Several volunteers said they had spoken with many other voters who said they would not be able to make it to City Hall to correct their ballots because of disabilities or lack of transportation. Voter outreach is a decentralized, ad hoc effort carried out by many different groups. While some voters told The Washington Post they had been contacted about their ballots multiple times, others said they had heard nothing until they received a call from a reporter. “Our fear is that there will probably be many thousands of Philadelphians who tried to vote legally and their votes won’t count,” said Benjamin Abella, an emergency physician who has volunteered with a group of fellow doctors working to inform voters that they need to correct their ballots. Abella said the effort by his group and others was a grassroots mobilization to compensate for the government’s lack of effort to reach out to voters individually. He said voters who did make it to City Hall found few workers ready to receive them — hence the long waits. “It’s really sad that this is the way democracy works in America in 2022,” he said. Shoshanna Israel, with the Working Families Party in Philadelphia, said the effort to help voters correct their ballots has snowballed since Sunday, with 250 people signing up for a phone bank session Monday night. The party has programmed voters’ names, absentee ballot type and county of residence into software that creates a custom script for voter contact volunteers. Several voters told The Post they had not received any notice from city government. Nick Custodio, deputy city commissioner, said Philadelphia officials placed a robocall to voters whose numbers they had. But otherwise, he said, “we are focused on tomorrow’s election.” City officials had announced that voters could nominate a replacement at City Hall until 5 p.m. Monday. But at about 3:45, officials told some in line they wouldn’t get to the office before closing time and wouldn’t be able to vote, according to Abella, who was there. The decision upset some, and sheriff’s deputies arrived to enforce the decision. City Commissioner Seth Bluestein, a Republican, tweeted that it was a “disgrace” that voters were put in the position of trying to heal their ballots at the last minute. City officials are “doing their best to help as many constituents as possible with very little time and resources,” he wrote. Not all counties in Pennsylvania notify voters when their ballots are incomplete and allow them to submit replacements. Courts have found that state law does not require counties to give voters an opportunity to correct defective ballots, but neither does it prevent them from doing so. In Allegheny County, where Pittsburgh is located, officials released lists of more than 1,000 names of voters with undated or incorrectly dated ballots. Just over 100 cured their ballots Monday, according to city officials. Darrin Kelly, president of the Pittsburgh-area AFL-CIO affiliate, said his members represent 147 of the voters whose ballots have been set aside there. Its volunteer telephone bankers had contacted about 100 of them by 5pm on Monday and expected to reach everyone by the end of the evening. “The most important thing is to protect our democracy and make sure everyone has an opportunity to vote,” said Kelly, who guessed that most of his members are Democrats. At a public meeting of the Lancaster County Board of Elections Monday, a citizen urged the board to notify voters who cast defective ballots and allow them to cast another ballot, saying to do otherwise would be tantamount to disenfranchising neighbors. One of the board members said he agreed, but the other two did not. “We have never cured ballots in Lancaster County. It’s a questionable process,” said Joshua G. Parsons, a county commissioner and board member. “It’s a dubious process.” In northeastern Pennsylvania’s Monroe County, Republicans sued last week in an effort to block officials from inspecting mail-in ballots before Election Day, the first step in the county’s effort to ensure that voters who returned ballots with errors — such as missing signatures or dates – they had a chance to cast a substitute. A state judge rejected that request on Monday. Meanwhile, the fight over undated and misdated ballots is far from over. When the state Supreme Court ordered counties not to count those ballots, it also ordered them to set aside those ballots and keep them — apparently in anticipation of more litigation. On Friday, several voter and rights groups filed suit in federal court, arguing that failing to count those ballots because of “technical insanity” would amount to a violation of the Civil Rights Act. Election officials fear delays in counting votes will fuel allegations of fraud Clifford Levin, a Pittsburgh-based Democratic election lawyer, said he expects as much as 1 percent of mail-in ballots to be accounted for by errors — an amount that can make a difference in tight races like the U.S. Senate race . As of Monday, more than 1.1 million Pennsylvanians had voted by mail, with about 70 percent of them Democrats. The Pennsylvania Secretary of State’s office has released the names of at least 7,000 voters whose ballots have been flagged for errors, but Levine said the number will rise by Election Day as more ballots arrive — and also because some counties chose to do not review mail-in ballots, notify voters of errors, or share the information with the state.
