(Reuters) -The U.S. Supreme Court passed up a chance to give politicians more power over how federal elections are conducted, declining on Friday to hear a Republican challenge to a Pennsylvania judicial decision requiring the counting of provisional ballots cast by voters who make mistakes on their mail-in ballots.
The justices turned away an appeal by the Republican National Committee and Republican Party of Pennsylvania of a decision by Pennsylvania’s top court on provisional ballots that the plaintiffs said ran afoul of legislature-crafted voting rules, violating the U.S. Constitution’s election-related provisions.
The dispute returned to the Supreme Court after the justices, on the eve of the November 2024 presidential election, rejected the emergency bid by the Republicans to block tallying the provisional ballots.
The Republicans objected to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s October ruling in favor of two Butler County voters who sought to have their provisional ballots counted after their mail-in ballots were rejected during that state’s 2024 presidential primary election for lacking secrecy envelopes.
Election rules in states like Pennsylvania that often play a pivotal role in determining the outcome of U.S. presidential elections are a particularly sensitive issue.
Republican President Donald Trump prevailed in Pennsylvania last November, but lost the state in 2020 to his Democratic predecessor Joe Biden, who won the presidency that year.
The case follows a major 2023 Supreme Court ruling that allows the justices to second-guess state courts if they undermine the power that the Constitution gives state legislatures to craft election rules.
That 6-3 ruling, which upheld a North Carolina state court’s decision that invalidated a Republican-drawn congressional map as unlawfully disadvantaging Democrats, also rejected a more extreme theory advanced by many Republicans and conservatives that would have removed any role of state courts and state constitutions in regulating federal elections.
The ruling, however, stopped short of announcing a legal test for determining when state courts have ventured too far in “arrogating to themselves” a legislature’s power.
In the Pennsylvania case, Republicans asked the Supreme Court to answer that question, contending that the state supreme court’s ruling violated the Constitution’s elections provisions, including that the “times, places and manner” of federal elections “shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof.”
Provisional ballots generally protect voters from being excluded from the voting process if their eligibility is uncertain on Election Day. The vote is counted once officials confirm eligibility.
Republicans intervened to defend Butler County’s decision not to count the ballots from these voters, saying Pennsylvania’s election law does not allow provisional ballots to be counted if a mail-in ballot was received on time by a county board of elections.
Democrats intervened on the side of the voters, contending that if a mail-in ballot is defective and cannot be counted, that person has not yet voted and a provisional ballot must be counted.
A divided Pennsylvania Supreme Court last October sided with the voters, saying that provisional ballots prevent double voting while protecting voters’ right to have one vote counted.
Friday’s action by the court was unexpected. The court had planned to release it on Monday along with its other regularly scheduled orders, but a software glitch on Friday prematurely sent email notifications concerning the court’s decision in the case. “As a result, the court is issuing that order list now,” said court spokesperson Patricia McCabe.
It is not the first time the court has inadvertently disclosed action in sensitive cases. Last year, an apparent draft of a ruling in a case involving emergency abortion access in Idaho was briefly uploaded to the court’s website before being taken down. That disclosure represented an embarrassment for the top U.S. judicial body, coming two years after the draft of a blockbuster ruling rolling back abortion rights was leaked in advance.
(Reporting by Andrew Chung; Editing by Will Dunham and Lisa Shumaker)
By Andrew Chung
