The United States 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court ruling on Tuesday that requires Pennsylvania to count undated or wrongly dated mail-in ballots, finding that a previous law rejecting such ballots violated the First and 14th Amendments. 

“The date requirement imposes a burden on Pennsylvanians’ constitutional right to vote,” the court held in an unanimous 3-0 opinion. “And it culminates in county election boards discarding thousands of ballots each time an election is held. The date requirement will not protect against the vast majority of attempts at voter fraud.”

Judges Patty Shwartz, an Obama appointee, Arianna J. Freeman (Biden), and D. Brooks Smith (G.W. Bush) heard the appeal.

The opinion came down just one day after the court blocked the Republican National Committee’s (RNC) request to stay the lower court’s decision until after the 2025 elections, in which Pennsylvanians will vote on judicial retentions, local offices and special elections to fill vacant legislative seats. In their motion seeking a stay, the RNC noted the mistaken mail-in ballot margin was outcome determinative in several races.

The lawsuit stems from a 2022 case when plaintiff-appellee Bette Eakin had her mail-in ballot rejected during the general election after she failed to write a date on her return envelope. She filed suit against the county election boards in all 67 Pennsylvania counties, alleging the date requirement violated the Materiality Provision of the Civil Rights Act, as well as the First and Fourteenth Amendments.

Just two of the 67 defendant county election boards defended the date requirement – Berks and Lancaster.

In her ruling, District Court Judge Susan Paradise Baxter, a Trump appointee, determined that the Materiality Provision “is triggered when conduct or laws restrict who may vote” but leaves “to the States to decide how qualified voters must cast a valid ballot. The court ruled that because the date requirement is embedded in the act of casting a ballot, it falls outside the Materiality Provision’s scope.”

Second, the District Court held that the date requirement violated the 1st and 14th Amendments to the Constitution, because it “burdened the right to vote and primarily regulated the mechanics of the electoral process.”

Interestingly, the court concluded that the date requirement imposed a “minimal burden on Pennsylvanians’ right vote,” citing the ease of dating an envelope and that the requirement is “non-discriminatory.” But the court slammed the door on the “proffered State interests advanced to support the date requirement – enhancing election efficiency, promoting solemnity, or preventing voter fraud” – saying none of them “justified the burden the date requirement imposed.”

The District Court also emphasized that the Republican National Committee had produced only lone case of criminal case of voter fraud involving a mail-in ballot, and the fraud in that Lancaster County case was easily detected. Christa Miller, the chief clerk of elections in Lancaster County, said in a deposition that “an outer envelope that is missing a hand-written date is no reason to suspect voter fraud.”

The appeal asked the 3rd Circuit to solely determine if the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’s requirement that mail-in ballots that arrive in undated or misdated return envelopes be discarded complies with its Constitution.

The Circuit Court’s opinion, written by Smith, emphasized that democracies should endeavor to count every vote, rather than hunt for disqualifying technicalities. “The date requirement seems to hamper rather than facilitate election efficiency. By its nature, it fails to add solemnity to the process of voting,” Smith wrote. “And discarding thousands of ballots every election is not a reasonable trade-off in view of the date requirement’s extremely limited and unlikely capacity to detect and deter fraud.

“Because of the Commonwealth’s date requirement, an inadvertent typographical error or a flipped number or even a stray pen mark in the date field will remove the ballot contained within the return envelope from consideration. And the voter may never be the wiser.

“Casting a ballot and having it counted are central to the democratic process. The date requirement does not play a role in election administration, nor does it contribute an added measure of solemnity beyond that created by a signature.

“Weighing these interests against the burden on voters, we are unable to justify the Commonwealth’s practice of discarding ballots contained in return envelopes with missing or incorrect dates that has resulted in the disqualification of thousands of presumably proper ballots.”

“This ruling is a decisive victory for voting rights and democratic participation in Pennsylvania,” said Uzoma Nkwonta, Partner at Elias Law Group. “The court recognized what we’ve long argued: that discarding otherwise valid ballots over trivial errors that have nothing to do with the voter’s eligibility is a violation of voters’ fundamental constitutional rights. We’re proud to have worked alongside the DSCC and DCCC in this critical fight to protect every Pennsylvanian’s right to have their vote counted.”

updated to include Nkwonta comment