Democrats thought they had an ace up their sleeve for the 2024 election.
But Trump just took it away.
Donald Trump handed Democrats one horrible defeat in court that will keep them up at night.
The Third Circuit Court of Appeals issued a 2-to-1 ruling overturning a lower court’s decision that Pennsylvania could count mail-in ballots that included an incorrect date or no date at all.
New Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley praised the decision as a major win for election integrity in one of the battleground states that will decide the winner of the 2024 election.
“This is a crucial victory for election integrity and voter confidence in the Keystone State and nationwide,” a statement from Whatley read. “Pennsylvanians deserve to feel confident in the security of their mail ballots, and this 3rd Circuit ruling roundly rejects unlawful left-wing attempts to count undated or incorrectly dated mail ballots.”
In 2019, the Pennsylvania legislature passed a controversial law allowing for mass mail-in voting that required voters to “fill out, date and sign the declaration printed on [the] envelope.”
The Pennsylvania State Supreme Court ruled in 2022 that ballots with no or incorrect dates should be segregated but not counted.
That prompted a lawsuit by leftist groups, including the Pennsylvania State Conference of the NAACP, Black Political Empowerment Project, Common Cause Pennsylvania, League of Women Voters of Pennsylvania, Make The Road Pennsylvania, and POWER Interfaith.
U.S. District Judge Susan Paradise Baxter then ruled that ballots with the wrong or missing dates could be counted as long as they arrived by Election Day.
Sanity won out in the Third Circuit Court of Appeals.
The fight was over on if not counting ballots with the wrong or missing dates violated the Materiality Provision of the 1964 Civil Rights Act which says Americans can’t be denied their right to vote due to issues that are “not material in determining whether such individual is qualified.”
The majority ruled that not counting ballots with an incorrect or missing date didn’t stop anyone from voting and only lays out the procedure for how to cast a ballot.
In fact, the biggest surprise about this ruling was that the three-judge panel in the Third Circuit consisted entirely of Democrats and that a Clinton appointee wrote the majority opinion.
“But our role restricts to interpreting a statute, and there we hold that the Materiality Provision only applies when the State is determining who may vote,” Clinton-appointed Judge Thomas Ambro wrote for the majority. “In other words, its role stops at the door of the voting place.”
“The provision does not apply to rules, like the date requirement, that govern how a qualified voter must cast his ballot for it to be counted,” the opinion added.
“Pennsylvania’s date requirement, regardless what we may think of it, does not cross over to a determination of who is qualified to vote,” the opinion concluded.
