Pennsylvania County Must Update Voters on Mail-In Ballot Status: Court

An appeals court backed a lower court ruling.

A Pennsylvania county must inform voters if their mail-in ballots have been counted or rejected, a state appeals court ruled on Sept. 24.

In a 2–1 ruling, Commonwealth Court judges said that a Washington County judge did not err when he decided in August that the county’s failure to notify voters that their ballots were rejected illegally deprived them the ability to challenge the rejection and cast provisional ballots.

Washington County Judge Brandon Neuman ordered county officials to notify voters whose mail-in ballots were rejected, “so the voter has an opportunity to challenge (not cure) the alleged defects.”

The voters can also cast provisional ballots, the judge said.

Washington County officials appealed the ruling, but Commonwealth Court Judge Michael Wojcik and Renee Cohn Jubelirer upheld the decision.

“The current policy emasculates the election code’s guarantees by depriving voters … the opportunity to contest their disqualification or to avail themselves of the statutory failsafe of casting a provisional ballot,” Wojcik wrote for the majority.

Neuman’s order was thus proper because the voters who challenged the policy clearly possess a right to relief, the harm they would suffer under the policy could not be compensated by damages, and continuing to deny voters due process will cause far greater injury than forcing a change in the policy, he added.

Commonwealth Court Judge Lori Dumas dissented, but did not explain why she was dissenting.

The case was brought by a group of voters, the Center for Coalfield Justice, and the Washington Branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

It centers around a policy adopted in April that had officials segregating some mail-in ballots found to have disqualifying errors, but not alerting the voters who cast the ballots of the development. Instead, all mail-in voters whose ballots were received were listed in the state’s voting system during the primaries earlier this year as “record – ballot returned” regardless of whether their ballots were segregated. Poll books showed the same.

No voters challenged their mail-in ballot rejection and no voters whose ballots had been set aside cast provisional ballots.

Pennsylvania election code states that a voter who requests a mail ballot and is not shown on the district register as having voted can vote by provisional ballot.

The policy meant qualified voters could not challenge the decision made by election officials, violating their due process rights, Neuman said. The voters were also deprived of their right to cast provisional ballots.

Washington County officials said notifying all the voters whose ballots are segregated would be too burdensome, but Wojcik and Jubelirer rejected that position, pointing to how officials have acknowledged that they gave notice to all voters whose ballots were set aside during the elections in 2023.