PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — The 2022 midterm general election is next week, and county elections officials are quickly moving to understand and adjust to a new ruling from the Pennsylvania Supreme Court that could affect many voters’ ballots.
The ruling states that any undated or incorrectly-dated absentee or mail-in ballot should not be counted.
The state Supreme Court has ordered all questionable ballots to be kept separate, noting the court is evenly split on whether their ruling violates federal voting rights laws.
Dates on mail-in ballots have been an issue since they were first used in the 2020 election. Guidance over the past two years has ranged from approval to count undated ballots, to allowances for a ballot to be counted as long as there’s any date, to the court’s ruling which came down Tuesday.
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The court’s move poses a slight roadblock for counties that already received high percentages of their mail-in ballots.
Montgomery County has received about 70% of the approximately 133,000 mail-in ballots they sent out, and they’re working to get clarification on what the state Supreme Court means by “incorrectly dated.”
“Once we have further guidance on the incorrectly-dated ballots, our team will need to manually review the voters' declaration on each envelope to ensure that the date meets the requirements,” Sawyer said.
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“We currently have 80,000 ballots in our possession that we'll need to review in order to determine who is now eligible to come in and cure their ballot, or may need to make alternate plans to vote provisionally.”
Sawyer says they will contact voters by email or phone if ballots are undated or incorrectly dated, and people can reach out to the county if they have questions.
“I would suggest sending us an email or using the Contact Us link on our website to get in touch with us,” said Sawyer.
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She says call volume is high, and her staff is working late into the evening. They can respond to emails at 9 p.m., but they won’t return calls that late.
Bucks County has processed about 98,000 mail-in ballot applications, while Chester County sent out about 75,000 mail-in ballots. Delaware County didn’t have available information.
Statewide, the number of mail-in ballot requests from Democrats nearly doubled the requests from Republicans.