US Supreme Court Overturns Pennsylvania Court – Rules that Ballots with Even Minor Flaws Cannot Be Counted in Elections

by Kari Donovan, REPUBLICAN BRIEF       October 13, 2022

That means that mailed-in ballots that are not completed or inaccurate are not going to be tallied into the total this time, as they were in 2020, and the Democrats are in a panic about it.

Joe Hoft reported for The Gateway Pundit and cited a Conservative Brief report:

The United States Supreme Court has sided with a Pennsylvania Republican in a ballot case for a judgeship.

The Supreme Court nixed a lower court ruling that allowed the counting of mail-in ballots that did not have the date on them, the Associated Press reported.

The justices vacated the Philadelphia-based 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling as requested by David Ritter, who lost his 2021 bid for a spot on the Lehigh County Court of Common Pleas to a Democratic rival by five votes after 257 absentee ballots without date notations were counted.

The high court’s action means that the 3rd Circuit ruling cannot be used as a precedent in the three states covered by this regional federal appellate court – Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware – to allow the counting of ballots with minor flaws such as the voter failing to fill in the date.

The campaign for Dr. Oz in Pennsylvania recognized that the lower court’s ruling was in error and would negatively impact future elections in the state, so they joined David Ritter in his appeal.

But the campaign for Oz submitted a brief in support of judicial candidate David Ritter. “The Third Circuit’s thinly reasoned and erroneous decision — which addressed a county judicial election conducted more than six months ago — is now being weaponized to undermine the apparent result of a statewide primary election for the Republican nomination to represent Pennsylvania in the United States Senate,” his attorneys said.

In May, the three-judge panel on the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals issued a ruling that said election officials should count several hundred mail ballots that were received without a date on the envelopes in an election for county judge that was received on time, Politico reported.

Pennsylvania elections are a joke and have been for some time. In 2019 the state’s auditor reported on the abysmal state of the state’s election process.

For any doubters that the 2020 Election in Pennysylvania was a mess – just look at the videos in the article below.

“The 2020 Election in Pennsylvania should never have been certified for Joe Biden. Never,” Hoft reported.

PA is the home of some very strange politics this campaign season as one Senate candidate is unable to speak without the assistance of a machine. It is so shocking that even the left-leaning show- The View, picked up on the disaster Democrats face in PA.

That might be why PA Democrats, who are seeing a disaster in their Senate race,  are already signaling they plan to ignore the US Supreme court ruling.

Despite the ruling by the high court, PA state officials are already planning on cheating and pushing their demands that all ballots be counted:

A top election official in Pennsylvania says the state will disregard the U.S. Supreme Court’s guidance on counting mail-in ballots arriving in envelopes with typos or incorrect dates, saying that the state’s Commonwealth Court has already established the practice as licit.

Pennsylvania’s election laws have historically required voters to include a signature and date on the outside of return envelopes when voting by mail.

However, acting Secretary of State Leigh Chapman announced that Pennsylvania election officials should continue counting ballots that arrive with improperly filled-out envelopes, in accordance with the Commonwealth Court’s previous ruling on the matter

Fox News continues:

“Every county is expected to include undated ballots in their official returns for the Nov. 8 election, consistent with the Department of State’s guidance,” Chapman wrote. “That guidance followed the most recent ruling of the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court holding that both Pennsylvania and federal law prohibit excluding legal votes because the voter omitted an irrelevant date on the ballot return envelope.”

A May 2022 decision in the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that ballots in this type of undated envelopes must be counted regardless. In the decision, the panel found that a handwritten date has no bearing on a voter’s eligibility and said it would violate voters’ civil rights to throw out their ballots in that election simply because they lacked a handwritten date.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that the prior decision is moot, returning to the established election laws.

Chapman says the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling does not affect the state’s current election protocol, which will continue accepting and counting the ballots in defective envelopes. She cited a separate Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania ruling that said such ballots must be accepted.