Supreme Court allows Pennsylvania to count contested provisional ballots

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 their mail-in ballot was to be rejected for a garden-variety error. While the Supreme Court action was a setback for Republicans, the GOP separately claimed victory in a decision by Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court. That court rejected a last-ditch effort by voting rights advocates to ensure that mail-in ballots that lack an accurate, handwritten date on the exterior envelope will still count in this year’s presidential election. The rulings are the latest in four years of litigation over voting by mail in Pennsylvania, where every vote truly counts in presidential races. Republicans have sought in dozens of court cases to push the strictest possible interpretation for throwing out mail-in ballots, which are predominantly cast by Democrats. Taken together, Friday’s near-simultaneous rulings will ensure a heavy emphasis on helping thousands of people vote provisionally on Election Day if their mail-in ballot was rejected — and potentially more litigation. 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 handwritten 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. A voting-rights lawyer in Pennsylvania who helped bring both cases said it is almost certain that another case over undated ballots will be back before the state Supreme Court within days after the presidential election if it is close. “It’s almost certain that this is going to be raised again after the election, especially if it’s a close election,” Witold Walczak, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, said in an interview. In its unsigned, two-page order, the state’s highest court put a lower court ruling on hold that would have required counties to count the ballots. The high court said the case won’t apply to the presidential election being decided next week, but held out the possibility that it would still rule on the case at a later time. The rulings came 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.

Trump is not immune from prosecution in his 2020 election interference case

A federal appeals panel ruled Tuesday that Donald Trump can face trial on charges that he plotted to overturn the results of the 2020 election, sharply rejecting the former president’s claims that he is immune from prosecution while setting the stage for additional challenges that could further delay the case. The ruling is significant not only for its stark repudiation of Trump’s novel immunity claims but also because it breathes life back into a landmark prosecution that had been effectively frozen for weeks as the court considered the appeal. Yet the one-month gap between when the court heard arguments and issued its ruling has already created uncertainty about the timing of a trial in a calendar-jammed election year, with the judge overseeing the case last week canceling the initial March 4 date. Trump’s team vowed to appeal, which could postpones the case by weeks or months — particularly if the Supreme Court agrees to take it up. The judges gave Trump a week to ask the Supreme Court to get involved. The eventual trial date carries enormous political ramifications, with special counsel Jack Smith’s team hoping to prosecute Trump this year and the Republican front-runner seeking to delay it until after the November election. If Trump were to defeat President Joe Biden, he could presumably try to use his position as head of the executive branch to order a new attorney general to dismiss the federal cases he faces or potentially could seek a pardon for himself. Tuesday’s unanimous ruling is the second time since December that judges have held that Trump can be prosecuted for actions undertaken while in the White House and in the run-up to Jan. 6, 2021, when a mob of his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol. The opinion, which had been expected given the skepticism with which the panel greeted the Trump team’s arguments, was unsparing in its repudiation of Trump’s claim that former presidents enjoy absolute immunity for acts that fall within their official job duties. “Presidential immunity against federal indictment would mean that, as to the President, the Congress could not legislate, the Executive could not prosecute and the Judiciary could not review. We cannot accept that the office of the Presidency places its former occupants above the law for all time thereafter,” the judges wrote. They said the “interest in criminal accountability, held by both the public and the Executive Branch, outweighs the potential risks of chilling Presidential action and permitting vexatious litigation,” and they rejected Trump’s claim that a president could have “unbounded authority to commit crimes” that would prevent the recognition of election results.