by WorldTribune Staff / 247 Real News August 26, 2025
The Third Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Tuesday that Pennsylvania’s requirement that mail-in ballots with missing or incorrect dates be thrown out as invalid violates the U.S. Constitution, Bloomberg Law reported,
“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,” said Chief Judge D. Brooks Smith.
“The date requirement seems to hamper rather than facilitate election efficiency,” the judge added. “By its nature, it fails to add solemnity to the process of voting. And discarding thousands of ballots every election is not a reasonable trade-off in view of the date requirement’s extremely limited and unlikely capacity to detect and deter fraud.”
The court denied the Republican National Committee’s (RNC) request to stay a lower court’s decision until after the 2025 elections. This year, Pennsylvanians will vote in several critical judicial races, including the State Supreme Court, and special elections to fill vacant legislative seats.
In their motion seeking a stay, the RNC pointed out that the mistaken mail-in ballot margin has determined several key races.
Tuesday’s decision was 3-0. The judges who issued the ruling were Patty Shwartz, appointed by Barack Obama; Arianna J. Freeman, appointed by Joe Biden; and D. Brooks Smith, appointed by George W. Bush.
The leftist Democracy Docket noted that the lawsuit stems from one in 2022 challenging the state’s orders to county boards of elections not to count mail-in ballots that were supposedly cast on time but missing a date, or containing the wrong date on the outer return envelopes.
President Donald Trump has vowed to eliminate mail-in voting, saying “If you don’t have mail-in voting, you’re not going to have many Democrats get elected.”
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