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In a move that could indicate that the U.S. Supreme Court is one step closer to intervening in a fight over Pennsylvania’s grace period for late-arriving vote-by-mail ballots, Judge Samuel Alito ordered the Friday all counties keep separate ballots that came in after November 3. and instructed state officials to explain before Saturday why the court should not intervene.
Many, if not all counties, were already complying with their demands.
Michael S. Williamson / The Washington Post
Election watchers watch Allegheny County officials manually review ballots Friday in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
The order came in response to a filing by the state Republican Party earlier in the day that once again urged the court to overturn a ruling from Pennsylvania’s highest court that allowed counties to count ballots received by 5 p.m. ( local time) on Friday, provided they were postmarked on Election Day.
The judges had rejected an earlier impulse to seek their intervention but noted at the time that they might be open to considering the issue in the future.
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So Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar had advised counties to segregate, but still count, any ballots that arrived in the mail after November 3 so that if the United States Supreme Court took the case, they could easily isolate themselves.
Julio Cortez / AP
People demonstrate in front of the Pennsylvania State Capitol in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, as the vote count continues after Tuesday’s election.
Republicans told the court Friday that Boockvar had been unable to verify that local electoral boards had been following that advice.
Alito, in his order, said that as of Friday, the court did not know that there was a question as to whether the counties were complying with the Boockvar guidance. But it fell short of granting the GOP’s request that those ballots not be counted at all until the general court decided whether to comment on the issue. Instead, the order directed counties to count late tickets separately, something many, if not all, have already been doing.
Alito’s order gave the State Department until 2 p.m. Saturday to file a response and said it would refer the matter to a larger court.
It is unclear how many ballots across the state could be challenged if the court intervenes in the case.
“There was a lot of noise in the Trump campaign that they will take us to the Supreme Court,” Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro told CNN on Friday. “But you are talking, perhaps, of several thousand ballots, not of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands … It is a relatively small number.”
– The Philadelphia Inquirer
