The Supreme Court on Friday rejected an emergency appeal from Republicans that could have led to thousands of provisional ballots not being counted in Pennsylvania as the presidential campaigns vie in the final days before the election in the nation’s biggest battleground state.
The justices left in place a state Supreme Court ruling that elections officials must count provisional ballots cast by voters whose mail-in ballots were rejected.
The ruling is a victory for voting rights advocates, who had sought to force counties — primarily Republican-controlled counties — to let voters cast a provisional ballot on Election Day if they had realized that their mail-in ballot was to be rejected for various garden-variety errors.
As of Thursday, about 9,000 ballots out of more than 1.6 million returned have arrived at elections offices around Pennsylvania lacking a secrecy envelope, a signature, or a date, according to state records.
Pennsylvania is the biggest presidential election battleground this year, with 19 electoral votes, and is expected to play an outsized role in deciding the election between Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Kamala Harris.
It was decided by tens of thousands of votes in 2016 when Trump won it and again in 2020 when Democrat Joe Biden won it.
The ruling comes as voters had their last chance Friday to apply for a mail-in ballot in a bellwether suburban Philadelphia county while a county clear across the state gave voters who didn’t receive their ballot in the mail another chance to get one.
A judge in Erie County, in Pennsylvania’s northwestern corner, ruled Friday in a lawsuit brought by the Democratic Party that about 15,000 people who applied for a mail ballot but didn’t receive it may go to the county elections office and get a replacement through Monday.