A Pennsylvania court Friday sided with left-wing special interests, blocking the state from enforcing part of a law that required mail ballots to be properly dated in order to be counted
In a 4-1 ruling, which saw President Judge Renée Cohn Jubelirer — elected as a Republican — side with three elected Democrat judges, the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania majority sided with the left-leaning American Civil Liberties Union and the Black Political Empowerment Project, among others, declaring the “strict enforcement” of state law (Act 77) requiring election officials to reject improperly dated or undated mail-in ballots “unconstitutional.”
Calling the decision a “wholesale abandonment of common sense” made in an “untethered and unprecedented fashion,” Judge Patricia A. McCullough described in a scathing dissent how the court majority bent over backward to ensure Pennsylvania voters did not have to date their mail-in ballots:
“[T]o reach its desired end, the Majority today (1) finds jurisdiction where it does not exist, (2) ignores more than a century of sound Pennsylvania Supreme Court precedent interpreting the Free and Equal Elections Clause, (3) applies strict scrutiny without any authority for doing so, (4) accepts Petitioners’ invitation to usurp the role of the General Assembly and re-write Act 77 of 2019 (Act 77), and, in a twist of tragic irony, (5) voids altogether absentee and mail-in voting in Pennsylvania.”
Act 77 was passed in 2019 as part of Pennsylvania’s mail-in voting law. State statute includes the requirement that “an absentee ‘elector shall. . .fill out,
