Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito ordered a pause for counting undated Pennsylvania ballots from a local race in 2021. The pause comes despite the fact legal teams for Republican Senate candidates Dr. Mehmet Oz and David McCormick are currently battling over similar issues in a PA Senate primary recount in court.
The Daily Wire reports:
Alito, who is in charge of emergency requests for Pennsylvania, issued an administrative stay for the counting of certain ballots in a judge’s race from 2021, according to The Washington Post. The Supreme Court is weighing the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit’s ruling that undated ballots received on time ought to be counted. This could impact the counting of ballots for the PA senate primary.
“The state’s requirement is that mail-ballot voters ‘fill out, date and sign’ a form declaration on the outer envelope used to return ballots,” the Post explained. “But the federal judges said not counting the votes of those who did not provide a date violated federal civil rights law because the requirement was immaterial to the voters’ qualifications. There are no indications of fraud, the ballots were received by the state’s deadline and election officials noted they would have counted ballots with the wrong date but not those with no dates at all, the judges said.”
While the McCormick campaign supports the counting of undated ballots, the Oz campaign — with the backing of the Republican National Committee (RNC) — argues that the ballots should remain uncounted. Indeed, the Oz campaign has claimed that McCormick is “following the Democrats’ playbook” and eroding voters’ confidence in the election.
Oz called himself the “presumptive Republican nominee” at the end of last week.
McCormick’s lawsuit asserted that the county election boards are “disenfranchising” voters who did not date their ballots. The suit, therefore, demands that the boards count ballots “that were returned on time but that lack a handwritten date on the exterior mailing envelope.”
Oz or McCormick will face Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman in November.
