Is This the End for Pennsylvania s Undated Ballots? – WSJ

Pennsylvania s election law, upheld by the state Supreme Court, clearly tells mail voters to fill out, date and sign the declaration. Last year, though, a federal judge ruled that the date field was effectively optional, citing the Civil Rights Act. That law prohibits states from denying a person the right to vote based on a nonmaterial error or omission on paperwork that is related to any application, registration, or other act requisite to voting.

But if that interpretation is correct, where does it stop? States have all kinds of neutral, de minimis rules for voting. Pennsylvania also rejects unsigned mail votes, as well as naked ballots that are returned without their mandatory secrecy envelopes. Other states require absentee ballots to have witness signatures and addresses. What else might judges deem to be immaterial, if Donald Trump leads President Biden by 1,000 votes in one state, or vice versa? That s the national nightmare.

A panel of the Third Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 this week that the lower judge s view is wrong. Her position, the majority says, cannot be reconciled with the text and historic backdrop of the statute, nor cabined to the date requirement while leaving intact other vote-casting rules that serve valid state interests. All three of the judges on this panel are Democratic appointees.

The majority argues that the Civil Rights Act provisions in question were aimed at ending literacy tests and other Jim Crow efforts to keep black citizens off the voting rolls in the South. No longer could States block ballot box access to an applicant who misspelled a State s name or failed to calculate correctly his birthday to the day, the ruling says. This obviously isn t what Pennsylvania is doing.

via www.wsj.com

Heh.