If you voted by mail in Tuesday’s General Election, you might want to make sure your name doesn’t appear on either of two lists the county has posted of voters whose ballots lack a proper date — or any date at all.
Here's a searchable database of the lists, created by WESA's Oliver Morrison:
The lists were posted Sunday evening, in the wake of a state Supreme Court decision this weekend governing the disposition of ballots enclosed inside “declaration envelopes” without the proper date. If your name is among the more than 1,000 that appear on either list, you are in danger of not having your vote counted. But you still have options to remedy the situation if you act quickly.
One option for voters whose declaration envelopes include improper or missing dates is to vote provisionally at their regular polling place on Tuesday. Those voters will be given a provisional ballot, which they will need to return to poll workers rather than it being scanned. Such votes are set aside until the county’s Return Board can verify the legitimacy of the ballot, a process that will not begin for several days after Election Day itself.
Alternatively, voters can “cure” the ballot by visiting the third floor of the County Office Building Downtown (542 Forbes Avenue) on Monday between 8:30 a.m. and 4:30 p.m. or on Tuesday during the voting hours of 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. Voters will be required to present a photo ID in order to cure the ballot.
Those who are unable to travel to the County Office Building or their polling place can designate a third party to cure the ballot for them by using a form. The designee must present the signed form and bring their own photo ID to present to election workers.
The newly posted lists reflect Allegheny County’s last-ditch efforts to assure all votes are counted after a decision by the state Supreme Court not to accept ballots that aren’t properly dated — even if the ballots arrive on or before Election Day. The court didn’t provide guidance about what dates would be acceptable until Saturday, by which point the county said in a statement, “There is not opportunity to notify impacted voters by letter.”
By Sunday night, efforts were already underway to reach out to voters whose ballots were at risk. Darrin Kelly, the region's top labor leader, said AFL-CIO staff were already searching for union members who might be on the list.
But not every county has been allowing voters to cure their ballots, according to Leigh Chapman, Pennsylvania’s acting Secretary of the Commonwealth. Chapman said voters in these counties who believe they made a mistake on their ballot should fill out a provisional ballot on election day at their polling place.
Sam Hens-Greco, who chairs the Allegheny County Democratic Committee, said efforts to connect with voters are "already in process. When we got notification about this, I said, 'We're going to be robocalling and texting those folks.'" County Republicans also plan to engage in notification efforts.
Litigation over the dating of envelopes goes back to the 2020 election, when the state Supreme Court agreed to accept ballots that arrived on time even without dates, despite a date requirement provided for in Act 77, the state law that allowed for the expansion of mail-in voting. Supporters of the date requirement are mostly Republican and say it is necessary to demonstrate potentially fraudulent voting. But others say the requirement is effectively meaningless if the vote arrives at county election offices by the time of the election.
Ballots with date problems have been kept segregated from other ballots.
There were already concerns that disputes over the "curing" of ballots could result in continued legal wrangling after Election Day. And it's unlikely that this weekend's events will make that any less likely.
As of Sunday evening, some 385 voters had sent in ballots with no date on their declaration envelope, while 618 had sent in ballots with a date that fell outside the range the court deemed acceptable. More such ballots could arrive by Tuesday.
The ACLU of Pennsylvania filed a lawsuit in Pittsburgh on Friday arguing that ballots should be counted regardless of the date, if they were otherwise legitimate. Vic Walczak, the legal director for the ACLU, told the Confluence on Monday that, even though this is an issue that has been litigated back and forth for a couple of years now, he thinks there could be a resolution to the latest lawsuit within a month.
