HARRISBURG, Pa. — Monday, people who had mail-in ballots for this year’s primary that were thrown out for technical reasons sued the elected commissioners of a western Pennsylvania county over a policy that was put in place. The people who were sued say they were purposely not told about the mistakes in time to fix them.
The local NAACP branch, the Center for Coalfield Justice, and seven disqualified primary voters sued Washington County’s election board for what they called “systematic and deliberate efforts” to hide the policy by telling election office staff not to tell voters who called that they had made mistakes that meant their votes could not be counted.
The case in the county common pleas court said that the policy kept 259 voters from voting, and a lot of those voters still don’t know it. The lawsuit says that the seven voters, whose ages range from 45 to 85, all had their mail-in votes thrown out because the dates on them were missing or incomplete. One also forgot to sign the outside paper, and another signed somewhere else.
Voters couldn’t find out that their ballot wouldn’t be counted because of what the board did, and they missed the chance to protect their right to vote by using a legal process that was already in place: voting by provisional ballot, the case said.
The lawsuit wants Washington County’s present policy to be ruled unconstitutional because it violates people’s rights to due process. It also wants to stop the elections board from hiding information from voters and misleading them. It was put in by lawyers from the Public Interest Law Center, the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, and the law firm Dechert in Philadelphia.
People in Washington County were told that their votes were filled out wrong and were given until this year’s April 23 primary to fix them. The Washington commissioners decided 2-1 not to let voters fix wrong ballots. Instead, they had staff mark them in the statewide elections software as “received,” which doesn’t let voters know that their ballots won’t be counted. The two Republican members were in favor, but the Democrat was against it.
People who filed the case say that no other Pennsylvania county “actively conceals the insufficiency of a voter’s mail-in ballot submission,” even when those voters call the county elections office to find out if their mail-in ballot meets the requirements and will be counted.
Monday, messages were left for Gary Sweat, the county’s lawyer, and Nick Sherman, the chairman of the Washington Board of Commissioners and a Republican. A lawyer for the ACLU said that they tried to talk to the commissioners about the problem but got no response.
A 65-year-old retired occupational therapist named Bruce Jacobs is one of the claimants. He told a video news conference that he found out his vote had been thrown out because he forgot to sign and date the return envelope after the primary was over. He said he was lied to and that his rights were taken away.
Jacobs said, “County officials have taken away people’s rights to the integrity of our elections.” “And I think this needs to change.”
A 2019 law in Pennsylvania made mail-in votes available to everyone, which was a goal for Democrats. The law also got rid of straight-ticket voting, which was a goal for Republicans. A few months later, there was a pandemic, which made more people want to vote by mail. Since then, Democrats in Pennsylvania have been much more likely than Republicans to vote by mail.
Several lawsuits have been filed over the process, mostly about whether mistakes made when filling out the outside of the return envelope can render the vote useless. The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals supported earlier this year a rule that the envelopes must have correct dates written by hand.
State elections officials say that during the April primary, redesigned outside envelopes cut down on the number of votes that were returned.
Advocates say that older voters are more likely than younger voters to send in voting envelopes with wrong or missing dates.