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The Pennsylvania Supreme Court on Friday blocked Republican efforts to automatically toss ballots with missing signatures or incorrect dates, affirming a lower court's decision to allow what's known as ballot “curing.”
Republicans nationwide have prioritized what critics call voter suppression measures ahead of this year’s midterm elections, using various measures and lawsuits to winnow down the voting population and put up barriers for voting blocs that often lean Democratic.
The Pennsylvania court case involved Republicans effectively waging an all-hands-on-deck effort to bar counties from alerting voters of ballot mistakes and allowing them to fix them. The plaintiffs included the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Senatorial Committee and the Pennsylvania GOP.
After a state judge rejected the Republicans' argument last month, they filed an appeal with the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. The court — which is down to six members after its chief justice died nearly a month ago — deadlocked on the appeal on Friday, automatically keeping the lower court’s ruling intact.
Studies in multiple states have repeatedly shown racial disparities in the ballots tossed for mistakes, with Black voters seeing their votes discounted at significantly higher rates than white voters.
Republicans trying to delegitimize Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss have zeroed in on ballot curing in Pennsylvania as an excuse, arguing the state’s lack of a uniform law dictating how each county should go about seeking fixes to incomplete ballots means said ballots should be tossed.
Former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, for example, falsely claimed ballot curing in Democratic strongholds “tip[ped] the scales of an election to functionally favor the Democrat Party.”
Those claims were dismantled in a fact check released by the University of Pennsylvania, which confirmed Pennsylvania’s use of ballot curing was bipartisan. And as for the total number of those votes deciding the election, the report claims there were “too few of them to make much of a dent.”
Republicans take yet another election-related L in court. And we can fault them for trying.