Appeals Court Decides Against GOP in Mail-In Ballot Dispute

A federal appeals court on Tuesday prohibited election officials in Pennsylvania from disqualifying mail-in ballots due to incorrectly dated return envelopes.

The litigation in the case stylized as Eakin v. Adams County Board of Elections dates back nearly three years.

Back in November 2022, various voters, public officials, and Democratic Party groups in the Keystone State filed a lawsuit against all 67 county election boards because of the “date instruction” rule that disallowed votes sent in “undated or incorrectly dated outer envelopes” from being counted.

In March, U.S. District Judge Susan Paradise Baxter, appointed during President Donald Trump’s first term, issued a ruling in favor of the plaintiffs. The court ruled that the state’s date regulations for mail-in ballots infringe upon the First and 14th Amendments.

Afterwards, multiple parties, including the Republican National Committee, joined the case and took it to the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Now, a three-judge panel has affirmed the lower court’s ruling in a 55-page opinion that fulsomely asserts the sanctity of the franchise.

“The ballot is a fundamental element of our democracy,” the appeals court begins. “Arguably, no civic activity is more significant—or has heavier repercussions—than the act of a citizen casting a vote.”

The opinion goes on to reference an idea promulgated by George Washington in which the U.S. serves as “the last great experiment [in] promoting human happiness.”

“Our Constitution calls upon the States to regulate the mechanics of how its citizens cast their ballots so that those citizens may meaningfully express their voices,” the court says. “But our Constitution also calls upon the Courts to scrutinize such regulations to ensure they do not unduly burden voters’ voices. This inquiry is often a difficult one.”

In the case, the plaintiffs argued that not counting the types of ballots in question amounted to constitutional and Civil Rights Act violations. That effort did not pan out. Earlier in 2022, the Republican Party successfully fended off a nearly identical Civil Rights Act-related challenge to the date requirements for mail-in ballots. The district court – and the 3rd Circuit – dismissed that challenge in turn.

But there were also constitutional challenges.

The plaintiffs argued those restrictions as well as “any other provision that requires voters to provide (correct) dates on their mailing envelope—or precludes election officials from counting ballots that lack such dates” were an undue burden on the right to vote.

“Weighing the burden that practice imposes on Pennsylvanians’ constitutional right to vote against the State’s interest in the practice, the balance of the scales leads us to hold that it does not comply with our Constitution,” the panel determined.

To hear the appellate court tell it, the burden imposed by the date requirement is a “minimal” one – which requires an analysis under the “less exacting” framework of constitutional interpretation.

Under long-standing ideas of constitutional analysis, the way a court approaches an inquiry into the validity of any given law is often determinative, if not dispositive. Typically, this is understood in terms of how harshly any given court will scrutinize the government’s behavior. In the parlance of the U.S. Supreme Court, there are three major frameworks: rational basis review, intermediate scrutiny, and strict scrutiny. In general terms, rational basis review often yields a win for the government; strict scrutiny often yields a loss for the government; while intermediate scrutiny is anyone’s guess.

Here, the judges say they are jettisoning the “traditional tiers of scrutiny” in favor of juxtaposing Pennsylvania’s “important regulatory interests” with the “downstream consequences” of the date rule.

In other words, the court says that while the government’s claims might be rational, they are not enough to warrant tossing out votes.

And, the court adds, the requirements in question simply don’t add up to any real argument in favor of good government.

In the appeal, the intervenors argued the date requirement “facilitates the orderly administration of elections.” Not so, the panel says.

“[A]s a general proposition, the date requirement does not seem to facilitate orderly election administration in any manner,” the opinion goes on. “The date on a return envelope does not inform whether a voter is eligible to cast a ballot. It does not indicate when a voter completed a ballot. And it has no bearing on whether a ballot is timely. If anything, requiring county election boards to check the date field on return envelopes seems to hamper efficiency by foisting an additional responsibility on the boards for no apparent purpose.”