Federal judge: Mail-in ballots missing handwritten date must still be counted

Mail-in ballots submitted on time but missing a handwritten date must be counted by county elections offices, a federal judge said on Tuesday.

To do otherwise would violate the federal Civil Rights Act, said U.S. District Judge Susan Paradise Baxter. Her decision followed a lawsuit filed last year against all 67 county boards of elections in Pennsylvania.

The 77-page opinion was hailed by voting rights groups as a victory less than a year before the 2024 presidential election.

The lawsuit was filed Nov. 4, 2022, by the Pennsylvania State Conference of the NAACP, Black Political Empowerment Project, Common Cause Pennsylvania, League of Women Voters of Pennsylvania, Make The Road Pennsylvania, and POWER Interfaith.

They were represented by the American Civil Liberties Union.

“Every eligible person who casts a ballot should have their vote counted,” said Witold Walczak, the legal director for the ACLU of Pennsylvania. “The handwritten-date requirement is completely irrelevant and unnecessary because elections officials know whether the ballot was received on time.”

The whole point of the Civil Rights Act, he said, was to stop states from disqualifying voters for frivolous reasons.

Diana Robinson, civic engagement director for Make the Road Pennsylvania, said the court’s decision affirms what is already common sense.

“A minor, meaningless technicality shouldn’t disenfranchise eligible voters,” she said. “As long as your ballot is received on time, the date written on the paper is irrelevant, and your vote counts.”

Bishop Dwayne Royster, executive director at POWER Interfaith, said his organization works to assure equitable access to the ballot box.

“We cannot allow technicalities to strip away the voices of countless voters who participated in the democratic process, particularly those of us who have historically faced barriers in accessing the ballot box,” Royster said.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Pittsburgh against all 67 county boards of elections and the acting secretary of the commonwealth, challenged instructions by the state at the time for officials to not count mail-in ballots that were either mis-dated or missing the handwritten date on the return envelope.

Those instructions, issued on Nov. 1, 2022, told county elections officials to “segregate and preserve” the ballots and not to count them.

The complaint alleged that those instructions violated the Civil Rights Act and disenfranchised voters.

In her opinion issued Tuesday, Baxter agreed, finding that the mandatory application of the date requirement violates federal law, which prohibits rules or regulations that add immaterial requirements to the act of voting.

Baxter found that the date requirement is one of those immaterial rules.

According to the evidence in the case, more than 7,600 mail-in ballots from 12 counties were not counted in the 2022 general election, Baxter wrote.

Those included: 1,009 in Allegheny County; 2,617 in Philadelphia; 66 in Washington County and 95 in Westmoreland.

Baxter noted, too, that the record in the case was replete with evidence that individual county boards were inconsistent in how they counted or rejected the ballots in question.

“This further supports the court’s conclusion that the date requirement is not material,” she wrote.

Baxter said the dates on the outer envelope are “wholly irrelevant.”

“The requirement at issue here is irrelevant in determining when the voter signed their declaration,” the judge wrote. “The important date for casting the ballot is the date the ballot is received.

“Here, the date on the outside envelope was not used by any of the county boards to determine when a voter’s mail ballot was received in the November 2022 election.”