Lawsuit says Pennsylvania county deliberately hid rulings to invalidate some mail-in ballots

HARRISBURG, Pennsylvania. The elected commissioners of a western Pennsylvania county were sued Monday over a policy adopted for this year’s primary in which people whose mail-in ballots were disqualified for technical violations say they were purposefully not informed in time. to correct errors.

Seven disqualified primary voters, the local NAACP branch and the Center for Coalfield Justice sued the Washington County election board for what they called “systematic and deliberate efforts” to hide the policy by directing election office staff not to tell voters who called that they had made mistakes that prevented their votes from being counted.

The lawsuit filed in county Common Pleas Court said the policy resulted in the disenfranchisement of 259 voters and many of those voters still don’t realize it. The seven voters suing, ages 45 to 85, had their mail-in ballots invalidated due to incomplete or missing dates, the lawsuit said. One also did not sign the outer envelope and another signed in the wrong place.

“Because of the board’s actions, voters had no way of knowing that their vote would not be counted and were deprived of the opportunity to protect their right to vote by taking advantage of an existing legal process: provisional ballot voting,” the lawsuit says. claimed.

The lawsuit seeks to have Washington County’s current policy declared unconstitutional as a violation of due process rights and to prevent the election commission from withholding information from voters and misleading them. The request was filed by lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, the Public Interest Law Center and the Philadelphia-based law firm Dechert.

Washington County notified voters that their ballots were filled out incorrectly and gave those voters a chance to correct them by this year’s April 23 primary. In this year’s primary, Washington commissioners voted 2-1 not to allow voters to remedy improper votes and had officials mark them in state election software as “received,” a statute that does not inform voters that their votes will not be counted. The two Republican commissioners were in favor, the Democrat was opposed.

The lawsuit says no other county in Pennsylvania “actively conceals the insufficiency of a voter’s mail-in ballot, especially when a voter calls the county elections office to ask whether their mail-in ballot meets the requirements and will be counted.”

Messages seeking comment were left Monday for Washington Board of Commissioners Chairman Nick Sherman, a Republican, and county attorney Gary Sweat. An attorney for the ACLU said attempts to engage commissioners on the issue have been unresponsive.

Retired occupational therapist Bruce Jacobs, 65, one of the plaintiffs, said in a video news conference that the primaries had long since ended when he learned his vote had been invalidated because he did not sign and date the return envelope. He said he felt deceived and that his rights were denied.

“County officials have eroded people’s rights to the dignity of our elections,” Jacobs said. “And I believe this must change.”

Pennsylvania made access to mail-in ballots universal, a Democratic priority, under a 2019 law that also eliminated straight-party voting, a Republican goal. The pandemic hit a few months later, spurring participation in voting by mail. In subsequent elections, Pennsylvania Democrats were much more likely than Republicans to vote by mail.

The lawsuit has sparked a series of lawsuits, particularly over whether errors in filling out the outside of the return envelope could invalidate the ballot. Earlier this year, the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals maintained a mandate Envelopes must contain accurate, handwritten dates.

During the April primaries, redesigned outer envelopes reduced the rate of rejected votesaccording to state election officials.

Older voters are disproportionately more likely to submit ballot envelopes with incorrect or missing dates, advocates said.