The campaign of Pennsylvania Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman has gone to federal court to try to count Pennsylvania voters’ ballots if they were not validly dated.
The question of whether mail-in ballots with incorrect or incomplete dates can be counted is one of the hottest voting disputes in the pivotal state ahead of Election Day, and a divided Pennsylvania Supreme Court recently ordered counties to refrain from counting mail-in ballots with missing or invalid dates on their outer envelopes.
But Fetterman and the constituents his campaign has aligned with are hoping the federal court will overrule the state court ruling.
“The Date Directive imposes unnecessary hurdles that eligible Pennsylvanians must clear to exercise their most fundamental right, resulting in otherwise valid votes being arbitrarily dismissed without any mutual benefit to the Commonwealth,” Fetterman’s attorneys wrote and Democrats in their new lawsuit filed Monday. the US District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania.
“The date on a postal ballot envelope therefore bears no relation to the qualifications of the voter and serves no purpose other than to create barriers to qualified voters exercising their fundamental constitutional right to vote. This unnecessary barrier violates the Civil Rights Act and the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the US Constitution,” they wrote.
Republicans have supported strict rules on mail-in voting that would force ballots with incomplete information to be rejected.
Fetterman’s campaign is joined in her lawsuit by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
“As we fight this latest Republican assault on Americans’ democratic rights, Pennsylvanians should check the status of their ballots to ensure their vote is counted. We are committed to using every tool at our disposal to protect the constitutional right of Pennsylvanians to participate in this election, including a GOP victory in court,” the groups said in a joint statement.
Fetterman’s race against Republican candidate Mehmet Oz is one of this year’s Senate races.
Republicans see retaining the seat of outgoing GOP Sen. Pat Toomey as key to their hopes of winning the Senate majority, while Democrats see up-and-coming seats in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, states that now-President Joe Biden are carrying in 2020 , as the best. way to deal with losses elsewhere.
Earlier Monday, a judge in Monroe County in northeastern Pennsylvania ruled that election officials could notify the few hundred voters there whose mail-in ballots were submitted with errors, to give them a chance to correct them.
The judge, Arthur Zulick, noted that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court had not reached the point of saying whether ballots with missing dates should be thrown out entirely or could be corrected by Election Day.
The district’s Republican Party had sued to prevent the voter outreach. The case was one of the most recent local disputes in Pennsylvania over the interpretation of how to handle defective mail-in ballots.
County voters who mailed in ballots without secret envelopes, outside signatures or dates will still be able to vote. Once notified that their vote may be voided, they will be given an opportunity to correct their ballots until 8 p.m. of election day.
Zulick noted that Republicans who brought the case told a hearing that they had no problem with voters correcting defective ballots if they delivered a ballot in person, “at the counter.”
“The only difference here is that the [Monroe County elections office] emailed or called voters to inform them of the defect in their ballots,” the judge wrote. “I do not find that there was fraud or that there was political partisanship [Monroe County elections] the staff or the Board of Directors”.
