(Headline USA) In the same area where former President Donald Trump was nearly assassinated, a Pennsylvania judge last week delivered a major win for election integrity by upholding the Butler County Elections Board’s ban on ballot-curing.
Not to be outdone, however, a Democrat judge ruled Friday that a Republican-controlled county violated state law in last April’s primary, when election workers neglected to tell voters that their mail-in ballots had been rejected and wouldn’t be counted.
As a result, Judge Brandon Neuman said, voters in Washington County were unable to exercise their legal right either to challenge the decision of the county elections board or to cast a provisional ballot in place of the rejected mail-in ballot.
Those lawsuits were among several courtroom battles already being waged in the hotly contested presidential battleground. Much like Florida in the 2000 Bush v. Gore election, the entire outcome of November’s contest between Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Kamala Harris could come down to how much latitude leftist election officials have to collect and count mail-in ballots after election night.
Despite polls suggesting that the Biden administration’s second-in-command may be pulling ahead following last week’s Democratic National Convention, Trump could win an Electoral College victory by reclaiming Pennsylvania and Georgia for the red column—along with holding all the states he won in 2020.
Georgia, the more reliably Republican of the two, closed many of the election loopholes that allowed Democrats to flip the state in the previous election.
However, Democrats still control all the levers of power in the Keystone State and have now codified some of the dubious COVID-era policies that helped them winnow down—and ultimately reverse—Trump’s massive election-night lead.
In the Washington County primary, election officials rejected 259 mail-in ballots that had been received before polls closed, or 2% of all mail-in ballots received on time, the judge wrote.
Roughly three-fourths of mail-in ballots tend to be cast by Democrats in Pennsylvania, despite—or perhaps because of—its demonstrated ability to facilitate fraud.
The NAACP and other lawfare groups sued the coounty earlier this summer on behalf of seven voters whose ballots had been rejected in the April 23 primary. The activists accused the county of violating the constitutional due process rights of voters by deliberately concealing whether their ballots had been counted.
In his decision, Neuman ordered county officials to notify any voter whose mail-in ballot is rejected because of an error—such as a missing signature or missing handwritten date—so that the voter has an opportunity to challenge the decision.
Neuman also ordered the county to allow those voters to vote by provisional ballot to help ensure they could cast a ballot that would be counted.
The conflicting decisions over ballot curing may send the matter to the state supreme court, where Democrats outnumber Republicans five to two.
Nick Sherman, the chairman of Washington County’s commissioners, said he and other county officials hadn’t decided whether to appeal.
However, Sherman called Neuman’s ruling a prime example of a judge “legislating from the bench,” while maintaining that the county’s practices were compliant with state law.
“I would question how you would read a law that is that black and white and then make a ruling like that,” Sherman said in an interview.
Sherman said state law does not allow the county to begin processing mail-in ballots—called precanvassing—until Election Day starting at 7 a.m.
However, Witold Walczak, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, which helped represent the plaintiffs, claimed county election workers could see right away whether a just-arrived mail-in ballot had mistakes that would disqualify it.
Most counties check for such mistakes and notify voters immediately or enter the ballot’s status into the state’s voting database, Walczak said. That helps alert a voter that their ballot was rejected so they can try to make sure they cast a ballot that counts, Walczak said.
None of that is precanvassing, Walczak claimed.
“Precanvassing is about opening the [ballot] envelopes,” Walczak said. “That’s not what this is. And if Sherman is right, then 80% of counties are doing it wrong.”
Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press
