PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — The Philadelphia city commissioners on Wednesday tossed out more than 3,000 mail-in ballots because of defects in the way they were filled out and returned.
More than 2,000 of the ballots had no signature. Nearly 500 had no identity verification. About 1,000 ballots were not inside the secrecy envelope inside the mailing envelope, as required by state law.
When the three commissioners met to vote on which mail-in ballots should count, they agreed some simply could not. Those were the ones that were unsigned or missing identification.
But there was disagreement about whether to count ballots that were not inside the secrecy envelope, or those with smaller defects such as a missing or incorrect date.
Commissioner Lisa Deeley argued that all of those ballots should count.
“The secrecy envelope does not determine when a ballot was received. The secrecy envelope does not determine if a voter is eligible to vote,” she argued.
“I think it is a complete and terrible injustice that we are throwing out otherwise perfectly legitimate votes based on immaterial defects.”
Deeley was partially successful. She and Chairman Omar Sabir, a fellow Democrat, saved some 600 ballots with defective dates in a 2-1 vote, with Republican Seth Bluestein voting against counting them.
The courts have gone back and forth on the question of whether mis-dated or undated ballots should count, so that decision could be challenged.
However, Sabir sided with Bluestein against counting the ones without a secrecy envelope.
Committee of Seventy President Lauren Cristella said tossing these so-called “naked ballots” was “unacceptable,” and she said the state legislature must act to prevent disenfranchising voters in future elections.
“There are corrections we can make to our election code that would allow eligible voters, who take the time and make the effort to cast their vote, to make that vote count,” she said.
“Having one ballot thrown out, let alone 3,000, is terrible for democracy.”