As Donald Trump and Republicans attempt to close the mail-in voting gap in perhaps the most consequential swing state of the 2024 election — Pennsylvania — the GOP is trying to encourage its supporters to use mail-in ballots while also trying to throw out some of those votes over what lawyers admit is an inconsequential paperwork error.
The debate centers around dates, specifically the tens of thousands of mail-in ballots that have gone uncounted for the last three years because of undated (or improperly dated) envelopes.
The dates on these envelopes don’t really serve a purpose. They aren’t used by election officials in any meaningful way. But if an envelope comes in without a date — or an incorrect date — the ballot is tossed aside.
To Democrats, who know they benefit the most from mail-in voting and therefore want to preserve as many ballots as possible, it’s a meaningless error. The dates aren’t used to verify eligibility or determine fraud. So what’s the point of them, besides erecting another bureaucratic hurdle for voters to clear before their voice is heard?
But to Republicans, who know every mail-in vote is more likely to be cast for a Democrat than a Republican, it’s about election integrity. It’s about following the rules. And, just like it is with Democrats, it’s about winning races.
Now, it’s a question Pennsylvania courts could decide in the coming weeks that could determine who gets the state’s 19 electoral votes and, consequently, who wins the 2024 presidential election.
At the end of August, the Commonwealth Court sided with a number of nonpartisan voting rights groups, calling the mistaken or missing dates “meaningless and inconsequential paperwork errors.”
Republicans, led by the Republican National Committee and the Pennsylvania GOP, appealed the decision to the state Supreme Court, which ruled on Friday that undated mail ballots can’t be counted due to a jurisdictional issue, not the underlying constitutional merit.
Former President Donald Trump has for years bashed mail-in and early voting as election fraud, but earlier this year, he reversed himself.
“ABSENTEE VOTING, EARLY VOTING, AND ELECTION DAY VOTING ARE ALL GOOD OPTIONS. REPUBLICANS MUST MAKE A PLAN, REGISTER, AND VOTE!” he posted on Truth Social in April.
But Trump’s sudden change of heart hasn’t stopped the RNC from leading the legal charge to throw out any ballot in Pennsylvania that isn’t dated.
In Pennsylvania, ballots are sealed inside a secrecy envelope and then placed in an outer envelope that voters must sign and date. All ballots have a tracker to see exactly when ballots are received and processed, meaning the handwritten date on the outside is not used by any election officials to determine if ballots were submitted on time.
“The one thing that is undisputed as a result of all of this litigation is that this date is meaningless. It’s superfluous. It is not used by election administrators in administering the election,” said Mimi McKenzie, legal director with the Public Interest Law Center, one of the firms representing the petitioners.
“It doesn’t determine if you’re a qualified voter. It doesn’t determine if your ballot was received in time. It’s not used to detect fraud,” she said.
She compared the efforts of Republicans fighting the decision to playing a “gotcha game.”
“People are human, and people sometimes make mistakes,” she continued, adding that the evidence shows that most people making this mistake are older voters.
Those voters include registered Republicans, Democrats and independents, some of whom were notified of the mistaken or forgotten dates outside the envelopes. Others never learn that their vote didn’t count.
Philadelphia voter Bruce Wiley is 71 years old, and he voted by mail for the first time in this year’s primary due to health limitations. He forgot to put the date on the outer envelope but had no idea he made a mistake. He didn’t learn until after the primary that he’d done anything incorrectly. But the forgotten date meant his ballot wasn’t counted, according to the brief.
It’s a similar story for Janet Novick, an 80-year-old retired schoolteacher in Bucks County who has been voting regularly since registering in 1979. After sending in her ballot, she received a voicemail from the county that her ballot would not be counted due to a “dating error,” according to the brief.
She mistakenly put her birthdate on the envelope instead of the current date. She was told by the elections office that the only way to correct the mistake was to go in person to fix it, but she and her husband could not go due to “mobility issues.” Their votes were therefore not counted.
Wiley and Novick are among the 4,421 mail-in ballots submitted in this year’s primary election that were not counted because of an incorrect or missing date.
While Republicans locally and nationally have been trying to boost mail-in voting among registered Republicans, the heads of the party are at the same time leading the effort to prevent thousands of ballots from being counted.
In a statement, RNC co-Chairs Michael Whatley and Lara Trump called the state Supreme Court’s ruling “a huge win to protect the vote in Pennsylvania” and “a major victory for election integrity.”
Scott Presler, head of the grassroots voter registration group Early Vote Action, agreed with Whatley and Lara Trump’s opinion that the case is a matter of voter integrity.
In his voter registration efforts across Pennsylvania, he and his 40 staff members are pushing for Republicans to request mail-in ballots. But unlike other GOP leaders, Presler is organizing Republicans to turn their mail-in ballots early to election offices in person, what he calls “in-person parties.” (In-person ballot returns start next month.)
“I do agree with that case,” he said of the state Supreme Court’s decision. “I’m glad to see that, and this is about education. We’re going to be teaching our people that are going to do mail-in voting, that are going to do early in person and that are voting for the first time how to do the envelopes correctly.”
Bucks County GOP Chair Patricia Poprik has pushed at the local level to close mail-in gaps between Democrats and Republicans in her bellwether county. She said the case comes down to the law and believes the court’s decision could set a bad precedent.
“I’ve been present when the ballots are put out there, we look at one and see there’s no date, and they were discarded,” she said. “Whether you agree with it or not, that’s the law. You’ve got to follow it.”
Poprik added that, if Democrats disagree with the law, they should change it in the statehouse. “We’d be fine with that, but for now, we’re following the requirements,” she said.
McKenzie said the Public Interest Law Center and other legal groups are currently looking at their options. They’ll have a public decision on the next legal steps “in the next day or so.”
While mail-in ballots will be sent out in the coming weeks, McKenzie said time is still on their side since county election officials aren’t allowed to process absentee or mail-in ballots until Election Day.
“For some, it has become very much a politically charged issue,” she said. “But for the groups that we represent, it’s simply about everyone being able — every qualified voter — being able to vote and to have their vote counted, no matter what their demographic is, no matter what their political party is.”
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Katherine Swartz is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.