The ACLU's effort to reshape PA's mail ballot law ... lawsuit in Butler County

[FakeNoose]

Lawsuit, records requests signal ACLU effort to target ‘notice and cure’ policies for flawed mail ballots



Spotlight PA link: https://www.spotlightpa.org/news/2024/05/pennsylvania-election-2024-mail-ballot-curing-rejections-aclu-lawsuit/

The ACLU of Pennsylvania is suing one county and may file more cases in an effort to challenge a policy that it says disenfranchises voters who make an error when casting ballots by mail. The case against Butler County, filed after the April primary, appears to be the start of a broader statewide effort by the group targeting the “notice and cure” process, a major gray area in state law that leads to uneven rules for voters across Pennsylvania.

Along with that lawsuit, the organization has signaled it is considering another, and has been filing public records requests to identify more counties that don’t allow voters to correct flawed mail ballots or provide notice to voters that their ballot will be rejected. Such records requests are often a precursor to a lawsuit.

A legal effort that changes where the courts stand on notice and cure policies could have a profound impact. Since Pennsylvania enacted its no-excuse mail voting law in 2020, counties have rejected thousands of ballots because voters failed to sign or date the outer envelopes, or made another technical error.

The rejection rate goes down significantly when a county notifies voters and allows them to fix, or cure, the error, according to county officials and a Votebeat and Spotlight PA analysis of available data.

- more at link -

We've talked about "ballot curing" before on DU. Some county elections commissioners are allowing ballot curing, and it's mainly happening where the counties vote blue. In the rural counties that tend to vote red, there's no ballot curing and every flawed ballot goes into a holding file where it will probably never be opened and counted.

In blue counties such as Allegheny County for example, the Election Commissioner's office will receive a flawed ballot where either the signature or the hand-written date on the outer envelope is missing/incorrect. The Commissioner's office will contact the voter (by phone or mail) and notify the voter that they have "x" number of days to come down to the Elections office and "cure " the ballot. The voter can sign or date the envelope correctly, and it must be done by the day of the election. The cured ballot is added to the other ballots which will be counted on election day.

There's no fraud involved in this, and there's also no way to know whether the flawed ballots were cast for Democrats or Republicans. The outer envelope will not be opened or counted until after the curing takes place. The ACLU is perfectly correct in filing a lawsuit against Butler County, and any Pennsylvania county where ballot curing is not being done.