last minute do over
Pennsylvania voters dash to cast new ballots after GOP lawsuit disqualified thousands of votes
Last week, thousands of mail-in ballots were invalidated by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of Republicans suing to disqualify any ballots with missing or incorrect dates. Some voters throughout the critical swing state were left scrambling to cast a new vote in time for it to be counted on Election Day.
Critics believe the lawsuit, and others like it in key battleground states are part of a "concerted attempt at partisan voter suppression." Republicans in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin are pushing to disqualify a large number of mail-in ballots while encouraging their supporters to only vote in person, The Washington Post reports.
Republicans in Pennsylvania filed their lawsuit in October to reverse the previously-approved policy of counting votes with missing dates on the outer envelopes. The state Supreme Court ruled in their favor and ordered election officials to refrain from counting incorrectly dated mail-in ballots. As a result, thousands of ballots were set aside, which experts say could significantly affect Election Day vote counts, per the Post.
Experts view these lawsuits as parallel to the larger campaign waged by the GOP against alleged voter fraud over the past two years. Republicans are also encouraging GOP voters to cast their ballots in person. Critics insist that this is an attempt to separate the parties by voting method so that their lawsuits target votes that are mainly Democratic.
Pennsylvania Democratic Senate nominee John Fetterman and his camp have filed a countersuit to get the Supreme Court's decision reversed, per CNN.