Judges allow provisional ballots for Pennsylvania voters

The top line

The Supreme Court rejected a bid by Republicans to block a lower court ruling that gave Pennsylvania voters access to provisional ballots if they misplaced their mail-in ballots, potentially opening the field for state fight for thousands of votes this would not have been expressed if the Supreme Court had sided with the GOP, as the court faces an anticipated slate of last-minute cases on state voting rules before Election Day.

Protesters gather outside the US Supreme Court in Washington, DC on December 7, 2022.

AFP via Getty Images

Key facts

Republican National Committee he asked The Supreme Court on Monday will block a Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling that allows voters to vote provisionally if mail-in ballots have errors, such as a missing signature or date on the envelope.

The Supreme Court rejected the request on Friday, saying in a filing that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s ruling related only to two votes cast in the months-old Pennsylvania primary and that the stay of the court’s ruling would not result in “a binding ” for Pennsylvania officials “responsible for running this year’s election.”

The decision comes after the court took up a voting issue in Virginia as Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares he asked The Supreme Court on Monday overturned a lower court ruling that blocked the state from conducting a voter roll sweep to remove 1,600 suspected noncitizens, which the federal government noted resulted in the mistaken removal of U.S. citizens.

The justices sided with the state in a 6-3 decision Wednesday, vacating the lower court’s ruling and allowing Virginia to move forward with the voter purge — offering no explanation for the decision and only noting that liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson reportedly refused Virginia’s request.

The Justice Department argued that voter suppression was illegal because it was done too close to Election Day under federal law. BARS states from removing voters from the voter rolls less than 90 days before the election, and lower federal districts and courts of appeals sided with the federal government, ordering Virginia to put the voters back on the rolls.

What to watch

It remains to be seen how many other disputes the high court will be asked to resolve before Election Day.

Tangent

Independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — who suspended his campaign and endorsed former President Donald Trump — also asked the court to consider his candidacy, asking that his name be removed from the ballot from Michigan and Wisconsin, although voting is already underway. Court denied those requests on Tuesday, leaving Kennedy on state ballots.

What we don’t know

If and how the Supreme Court could affect the election. Trump and his allies asked the court in 2020 to accept a series of post-election disputes challenging President Joe Biden’s win, as the former president fought in court to try to overturn the election results. Supreme Court uniformly REJECTED all of these challenges, but it remains to be seen how the conservative 6-3 court will act if it is asked to consider any post-election challenges again this cycle. The judges already gave Trump a win before the general election, defeating efforts by Democrats to disqualify him from state ballots under the 14th Amendment, governing states cannot remove federal candidates.

Surprising fact

The Supreme Court apparently gave itself more leeway to create states’ election rules with its 2023 ruling in the case of voting Moore v. HarperVox NOTES. The court struck down a legal theory in that case that Trump and his allies tried to use to overturn the 2020 election, which argued that state lawmakers should have broad authority to set election rules — a power that Trump wanted state lawmakers to use it to repudiate their states. election results and declare Trump the winner. That said, the justices also ruled that state courts cannot strike down state legislatures’ election rules in a way that “exceeds

Key background

Both Republicans and Democrats filed dozens of lawsuits challenging the voting rules before Election Day, especially as Trump and his allies sowed distrust in the election results and the electoral process. The RNC has launch a massive “election integrity” effort targeting voting practices the party believes will enable voter fraud — even though evidence shows such fraud is extremely rare and there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud in recent elections . As did the GOP-led states close voting rules in response to Trump’s fraud claims, Democrats have also filed numerous lawsuits to expand voter access. While legal battles have raged in the courts for months, legal decisions intensified before Election Day, and Marc Elias, a Democratic-aligned voting rights attorney, said As of Sunday 199 challenges remain pending in 40 states.