21-03-2025
ACLU: ‘Notice and cure' policies helped 9,000 Pennsylvanians have their votes counted
A voter deposits a mail-in ballot at the drop box outside the Chester County Government Center on Tuesday, Nov. 5, 2024. (Capital-Star/Peter Hall)
More than 9,000 Pennsylvanians successfully cast ballots in the 2024 election, after they initially made mistakes on vote-by-mail ballots, a voting rights group said.
About half of the voters who made errors on their mail ballots were able to preserve their rights to vote. That's an improvement over recent elections, when confusion over the rules for voting by mail caused as many as 22,000 voters to be disenfranchised in 2022.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania said its analysis of the 2024 election found more than 7,000 voters were notified by county election officials they forgot to sign or date their ballot envelopes or made similar disqualifying mistakes. County policies allowed those people to correct the errors and have their ballots counted.
A further 2,000 were able to vote because of a state Supreme Court decision last year that requires county election officials to count provisional ballots cast by voters who find out that their mail ballots have been disqualified.
But more than 8,500 voters still did not have their votes counted because of errors that have not bearing on their qualifications to cast ballots, the analysis found. And 6,500 mail ballots were not counted because they arrived after the Election Day deadline.
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The findings the ACLU of Pennsylvania published Thursday show county policies and the Supreme Court's ruling made a difference, Mike Lee, the group's executive director, said.
'That's a win for democracy, and we applaud the majority of counties that inform voters about their potentially disqualifying mistakes. Our question for the other counties is, 'Why aren't you doing more to help people vote?'' Lee said in a statement.
Pennsylvania's 67 counties have a patchwork of differing practices under Act 77, which made voting by mail without an excuse an option for the first time in 2020.
Some counties inform voters by telephone, email or letter that they have made mistakes ahead of Election Day. Others record canceled ballots in the Statewide Uniform Registry of Voters (SURE), which automatically generates an email that tells voters about their ballot's status. When voters know there's a problem, they can preserve their right to vote by casting a provisional ballot at their polling place.
In a case led by the ACLU of Pennsylvania and the Public Interest Law Center last year, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of voters from Butler County that election officials were required to count the provisional ballots cast after their primary ballots were canceled.
Marian Schneider, the ACLU of Pennsylvania's senior policy counsel for voting rights, told the Capital-Star the Supreme Court has not made a definitive ruling whether county election officials are required to give voters a chance to fix their mistakes. The Election Code doesn't directly address the subject leaving counties broad authority to do what they want, Schneider said.
The Department of State, which oversees elections at the state level, could make a rule that all counties have to record whether a ballot has been rejected in the SURE system. That would give voters the notice they need to cast a provisional ballot, Schneider said.
Legislation awaiting action in the state House would address three of the main reasons mail-in ballots get rejected.
House Bill 499 introduced by Rep. Joe Webster (D-Montgomery) would change the deadline to apply for a mail ballot from seven days before the election to 12 days, to ensure that the postal service has enough time to deliver and return them.
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It would also eliminate the requirement to use a blank secrecy envelope inside the return envelope for mail ballots. Ballots returned without secrecy envelopes now must be disqualified.
Webster's bill would clarify that the requirement to sign and date mail-in ballots means to include the date of the voter's signature. It would also state that failing to date the ballot cannot be the sole reason to disqualify the ballot.
And it would explicitly give counties the authority to use ballot drop boxes and establish minimum requirements for the counties that choose to do so.
Another measure Webster introduced, House Bill 473, would prohibit third-party organizations from sending ballot applications to eligible voters. Ballot applications submitted in bulk, sometimes with incorrect information, prompted investigations in several counties last fall.
Rep. Scott Conklin (D-Centre) introduced House Bill 37 to allow counties to begin preparing to count mail ballots up to a week before Election Day. Election workers now may not begin preparing mail ballots until polls open on Election Day, leading to delays in providing election results.
The legislation, which Conklin said is consistently the most requested change to Act 77, passed the House last session but was not considered in the Senate.
