NAACP, ACLU, and others file lawsuit over mail-in ballots
HARRISBURG (KDKA) - The NAACP, ACLU, and other political organizations are suing the Pennsylvania courts over mail-in ballots.
They want mail-in ballots with improper dating to be counted.
This comes just days after the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that they shouldn't be counted after a lawsuit was filed by the Republican National Committee.
The court ruled that undated ballots received at election offices must be set aside and not counted.
Now, they are clarifying what "incorrectly dated" means. They are ballots with outer envelopes listing a date that falls outside the date range of September 19, 2022, through November 8, 2022.
Ballots dated November 8 but received before then are considered correctly dated and will be counted.
If you are concerned that you may have left your mail-in ballot undated or put a date outside that range, you can call your county elections office on Monday and ask to have your ballot "cured."
You can find a list of those phone numbers at this link.
With the 2022 midterms less than two days away, a lot of people are talking about heading to the polls and voting on Tuesday.
And while many will cast their ballots in person, some in Pennsylvania have already mailed in their ballots to be counted.
The issue is, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court has ruled that if a mail-in ballot was not dated or was dated incorrectly, that ballot would not be counted, but rather segregated and held by the county and state.
Vic Walczak of the ACLU said that they believe this is in direct violation of people's civil rights and election laws and that his organization, along with several others are filing a federal lawsuit. The suit comes against the Acting Secretary of the Commonwealth, as well as county elections boards across Pennsylvania.
Voting should not be this hard," Walczak said. "Whether you put the date on there or not...has no bearing on whether you are an eligible voter. You don't get a ballot unless you've sent in an application and the County Elections Board has verified that you are eligible to vote."
Walczak went on to say that the only issues they see with ballots and dates are when a mail-in ballot is received by the election's office and not when the ballot was signed. And he says that undated mail-in ballots directly affect senior votes.
"In our lawsuit against Lehigh County, is that... it was a little bit over 1% of the voters who voted by mail and forgot to write the date. More than 75% of those were over the age of 65. I think that there were 10 or 12 over the age of 90 and two that were over 100. So this is an issue that will disproportionally affect senior voters," Walczak added.
While the ACLU's lawsuit is pending, it is important to note that if you feel you've improperly dated your mail-in ballot or worse, forgot your signature, you may be able to go to your county's elections board and fix it. It depends on the county.
The other thing you can do is cast a provisional ballot on election day at your polling place just to be safe.
Anyway, you cut it, time is running out to fix this issue for this election; an election that may see some very tight races in which every vote counts.