Luzerne County employees open mail-in ballots to be counted at the elections board in Wilkes-Barre. Pennsylvania mail-in ballots are being counted with about fifty thousand in total, Luzerne County hopes to finish tonight.
Aimee Dilger | LightRocket | Getty Images
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court on Monday dealt President Donald Trump’s campaign yet another legal loss, ruling that mail-in ballots cast in the state’s presidential election can be counted even if a voter failed to completely fill out the envelope.
The ruling comes on the heels of a federal judge’s decision in the state that dismissed the campaign’s request to block certification of votes expected to confirm a victory there for President-elect Joe Biden.
The Trump campaign has consistently lost or withdrawn court cases that have sought to reverse votes for Biden.
The state Supreme Court’s judgment knocked down multiple lawsuits that the Trump campaign had been pursuing as part of its efforts to overturn the outcome of Pennsylvania’s presidential election.
These cases were aimed at the Board of Elections in Philadelphia County, the most populous area in Pennsylvania and one that overwhelmingly voted for Biden over Trump.
The campaign’s lawsuits were focused on the fewer than 9,000 absentee and mail-in ballots that the county elections board decided to count despite possible errors on the outer envelopes.
The Supreme Court noted that the campaign was not arguing that there was any evidence of fraud associated with these ballots.
“Here we conclude that while failures to include a handwritten name, address or date in the voter declaration on the back of the outer envelope, while constituting technical violations of the Election Code, do not warrant the wholesale disenfranchisement of thousands of Pennsylvania voters,” Justice Christine Donohue wrote in the judgment of the court.
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