Supreme Court turns away GOP plea to disqualify Pennsylvania voters who mailed ballots with errors

WASHINGTON —  The Supreme Court on Friday turned down an appeal from the Republican National Committee and refused to disqualify Pennsylvania voters who had sent in a mail ballot with an error on the envelope.

There were no dissents.

The decision is a victory for voting rights advocates who fought the issue in Pennsylvania courts.

They said voters should not lose their right to vote because they made a minor error on the mailing envelope.

The court did not issue an opinion explaining its decision. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., in a separate statement, said the Pennsylvania ruling was “controversial” and questionable, but there were procedural reasons for not ruling on the matter now.

Fellow conservative Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil M. Gorsuch said they agreed.

In response to the decision, Witold Walczak, legal director of the ACLU of Pennsylvania, said “a petty error that is irrelevant to a person’s eligibility to vote should never interfere with the counting of ballots, and provisional ballots are a decades-old fail-safe, a backup, for voters. We’re grateful that the RNC’s argument has failed and that voters can count on provisional ballots as a way to make sure that their vote counts.”

The Harris-Walz campaign also applauded the outcome. “Today’s decision confirms that, for every eligible voter, the right to vote means the right to have your vote counted,” a campaign statement read.

A decision in favor of the RNC could have affected several thousand voters across a state that is pivotal in the presidential race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Trump.

Last month, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court gave legally registered voters a second chance to cast a ballot. By a 4-3 vote, the state justices ruled that voters who sent in a defective mail ballot could go to their polling place on election day and file a provisional ballot that would be counted.

Trump and the Pennsylvania Republicans were highly skeptical of voting by mail four years ago, contending that it could lead to fraud.

The Supreme Court conservatives have also been skeptical of judges making last-minute changes in voting rules.

On Monday, the RNC filed an emergency appeal in the Supreme Court and argued that the state court had “dramatically changed the rules on mail voting ... in the midst of the ongoing general election.”

They said Pennsylvania law did not “create a cure process for mail ballot errors.”

Their appeal asked the justices to either throw out the state court ruling entirely or order the “segregation of affected provisional ballots” so they can be counted separately.

Election officials in Pennsylvania said the RNC claim is wrong. They told the court that many counties have offered provisional ballots to voters whose mail ballot was flawed. They said it would be a dramatic change in the law to revoke that standard practice.

In its 4-3 decision, the state court said voters should not lose their right to vote because their mail ballot had an error on the envelope, such as a missing date or signature, or it was not mailed in a cover envelope.

The state judges agreed those defective ballots were “void” and could not be counted, but they said the voters should be permitted to cast a provisional vote in person.

“What honest voting principle is violated by recognizing the validity of one ballot cast by one voter?” state Justice Christine Donohue said for the majority.

The ACLU and other voting rights advocates defended that decision in response to the RNC’s appeal.

“The provisional voting process ensures that, for each voter, one ballot will be counted — not two ballots, and not zero ballots,” they argued.