OAN Staff Abril Elfi
5:26 PM – Wednesday, August 27, 2025
A federal appeals court has ruled that Pennsylvania cannot reject mail-in ballots solely because the voter failed to write an accurate date on the ballot’s return envelope.
In a unanimous decision Tuesday, the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Pennsylvania cannot disqualify mail-in ballots solely because the return envelopes are missing or have incorrect dates.
The court ruled that enforcing this requirement imposes an unreasonable burden on voters’ Constitutional rights with little to no benefit in preventing fraud.
The three-judge panel, in a 55-page opinion, weighed Pennsylvania’s interest in enforcing the rule against the Constitutional right to vote. The judges concluded they “could not justify” throwing out ballots over date issues, a policy that has led to the rejection of thousands of ballots that were otherwise valid.
State law requires voters to add a date on the return envelope of their mail ballot. But many voters misunderstand the rule, either omitting the date or mistakenly writing something like their birthday instead.
GOP leaders insist the date mandate protects election integrity, and they have advocated for a strict reading of the law to disqualify ballots without proper dates. Yet, election officials have argued that the date serves no real purpose in verifying timeliness or eligibility.
The appeals court noted in its opinion that accepting ballots with missing or incorrect dates “will not interfere with fraud detection.”
“Discarding thousands of ballots in every election is not a reasonable trade-off when the date rule has almost no capacity to detect or deter fraud,” the judges wrote.
They also emphasized that the requirement “appears to hinder rather than improve the efficiency of elections.”
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