The Supreme Court denied on Friday an emergency request from Republicans to block election officials in Pennsylvania from accepting certain provisional ballots in the 2024 election.
The Supreme Court’s order came in response to the Republican National Committee and the Pennsylvania GOP asking the high court to pause a recent ruling from the left-leaning Pennsylvania Supreme Court that is set to allow more voters to cast provisional ballots on Election Day.
The Supreme Court’s decision could affect, according to Republicans, “tens of thousands of votes” in a swing state widely viewed as a must-win for presidential candidates and one that could help tip the balance of power in the Senate.
Attorneys for the Republican groups argued that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court defied the General Assembly when it ordered election officials statewide to accept provisional ballots on Election Day from people who submitted defective mail-in ballots.
Pennsylvania is unique in that its law gives each of the state’s 67 counties significant discretion over whether to offer voters who submit problematic mail-in ballots the option to fix their ballots so that their votes will count, a process known as “ballot curing.”
The RNC and state GOP attorneys argued that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s decision “effectively creates a [statewide] cure process for mail-ballot errors — a process everyone agrees the General Assembly has deliberately chosen not to create.”
In Pennsylvania, more than 1.5 million mail-in ballots have been cast, a portion of which will inevitably have deficiencies. Those can include missing or mismatched signatures, missing or incorrect dates, or, in the case of the lawsuit brought before the Supreme Court, a missing mandatory inner sleeve for the ballot, called a “secrecy envelope.”
Pennsylvania Democrats opposed the Republicans’ request, arguing that requiring all counties to offer provisional ballots to those who have turned in faulty mail-in ballots aligned with state law. They said that even though curing options are up to individual counties, provisional ballot rights are uniform across the state.
If voters are informed that they submitted a mail-in ballot that will not be counted, they have the right to submit a provisional ballot since the mail-in vote was never actually cast, the Pennsylvania Democrats said. Republicans noted that not every county gives voters advanced noticed that their mail-in ballot will not be counted.
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The Democrats joined two plaintiffs in the case, Faith Genser and Frank Matis. The pair were informed that they had cast defective mail-in ballots in the primary in Butler County and attempted to correct the problems by instead casting provisional ballots, an option election officials initially told them was available.
Genser and Matis brought the original lawsuit against Butler County after their provisional ballots were rejected on the grounds that they had already submitted mail-in ballots.