In a refreshing change for the safeguarding of ELECTION INTEGRITY, one of the states which’d been a most egregious violator of the same during the 2020 elections had a momentary bout of sanity strike their high court yesterday. In a ruling that was a victory for both the state statute as written and Republicans who have filed repeated lawsuits to have the statute enforced, the PA high court said that mail-in ballots received with improperly dated envelopes would NOT be counted.

County boards of elections will not be allowed to count any absentee or mail-in ballots contained in undated or incorrectly dated outer envelopes, Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court ruled Tuesday.

The court ruled that election boards should hold onto and preserve ballots without handwritten dates or with incorrect dates.

The ruling came in a compressed timeline and will impact the counting of ballots in the 2022 midterm election, only one week away.

National and state Republican officials and organizations had petitioned the court to not count these undated ballots. Democrats, led by Gov. Wolf, had argued that envelopes with handwritten dates should not be necessary for counting voters’ ballots.

Voters’ hand-written dates on the exterior security envelopes have been a controversial issue in Pennsylvania since the 2020 election cycle.

The dates — and voters’ signatures — are required under the 2019 law that legalized mail-in ballots in the Commonwealth.

Again, as in the 2020 election, a PA secretary of state took it upon themselves to direct county election officials to ignore the election laws as passed by the legislature, and count anything that came in.

Acting Secretary of the Commonwealth Leigh Chapman has issued guidance to elections officials requiring counties to count the ballots. Pittsburgh’s Action News 4 reached out to her office and was told they do not have a comment at this time on how the new decision affects this guidance.

Ah, the delicious irony of the Democrats’ protests at being foiled does not escape me.

…The ruling is a win for Republicans, who filed the case and who have been fighting to eliminate ballots with incorrect information on them in an effort they say is meant to ensure election security. Democrats say the lawsuits are really efforts to disallow votes and could sway tight races.

Do. Tell. Not counting those illegal by state statute ballots might “sway a tight race”? Kind of the baked-in plan, no?

…The question of whether ballots with small errors such as a missing date on the envelope or a signature that does not precisely match the one a voter used when registering to vote has been hotly contested in recent elections in Pennsylvania.

In 2020, county boards of elections in the state were prohibited from rejecting absentee or mail-in ballots based on signature comparisons, rejections that Democrats said were aimed at throwing out votes for U.S. President Joe Biden, who defeated Republican incumbent Donald Trump that year.

I love how Al-Reuters characterizes the mistakes, too – “small” errors. Well, isn’t it funny that what Reuters decides themselves is small is something that the PA legislature specifically addressed in their legislation, rendering Reuters’ opinion moot. Small, medium, or ginormous in scope, those errors disqualify the ballot. Period. As a Democrat, I’d be mildly insulted that the inference is that the persons incapable of following simple election law (LAW, mind you) were all Biden voters, but that’s how they roll. Having foisted Biden on this country through hook and crook, it’s more fact than insult.

We are a party of functional illiterates but we ARE a team.

I believe they will have to rejigger the playbook with only a week to go. *grin* Best be quick on their feet if the lawsuits don’t pan out!

God forbid we have a dang near “honest” PA election. I know, I know – don’t get cocky.