The Pa. Supreme Court is taking on the issue of undated mail ballots just weeks before Election Day

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court is taking on the question of undated mail ballots.

The court on Friday accepted a lawsuit filed by a coalition of Republican groups, including the Republican National Committee and Pennsylvania GOP, that seeks to block undated mail ballots from being counted.

Friday’s move was an unusual one — the lawsuit was filed Sunday directly with the state’s high court, asking it to use a rare power to take up an issue before going through the normal court process. The justices’ acceptance of the lawsuit suggests they see the question of undated ballots as urgent and important.

And as they granted the request Friday, they fast-tracked the case, setting a deadline of Monday for the Republican groups to file their arguments and Tuesday for the Pennsylvania Department of State, Democratic groups, and all 67 county boards of elections to respond.

That could allow them to rule before this year’s vote count. And beyond affecting the votes in this year’s crucial races for U.S. Senate, governor, and more, the case could provide clarity on an issue that has been a persistent source of political and legal conflict since the 2020 election.

State law requires voters to handwrite a date on the outer envelope when returning mail ballots. But the question of whether they can be counted without a date or must be thrown out — even though they were received on time — has become complicated over the past few years.

A series of lawsuits in state and federal courts have created a murky legal landscape in which Democrats, using one set of court rulings, say undated ballots must be counted — and Republicans, using another, say they must be rejected.

Beginning in 2020, state courts had ruled that Pennsylvania election law’s date requirement means counties should reject undated ballots. Republicans have pointed to those rulings, particularly one from the state Supreme Court. Under those rulings, the Pennsylvania Department of State had told counties to throw the ballots out, which counties had widely accepted.

But a federal court ruling this year upended that.

Shortly after the May 17 primary election, a federal appeals court said — in a lawsuit over undated mail ballots in Lehigh County from 2021 — that the practice of rejecting undated mail ballots violates federal civil rights law. Because ballots are accepted as long as they have any date, such as a voter’s birth date, the act of dating the ballot is a technicality, the court said, and it would be unfair to use it to reject otherwise legal votes.

That ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit was quickly embraced by Democrats and the Pennsylvania Department of State, which oversees elections and is part of Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf’s administration. The state immediately reversed its previous guidance, telling counties they should now count undated ballots.

A series of legal fights in state court followed, prompting Commonwealth Court President Judge Renée Cohn Jubelirer to rule this summer that undated mail ballots should be counted under both state and federal law, in part by adopting the Third Circuit’s reasoning. Republicans, however unhappily, generally agreed that the new set of court rulings tied counties’ hands: Undated ballots would have to be counted.

But they also appealed the Third Circuit’s decision — and the U.S. Supreme Court this month vacated that ruling, once again injecting uncertainty into the undated ballot issue.

In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s order, Democrats have argued that nothing has changed, and Cohn Jubelirer’s rulings should still require counties to count undated ballots. The Department of State continues to say it expects counties to do so.

But Republicans disagree. On Sunday, the Republican groups filed what’s known as a King’s Bench petition with the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, asking it to immediately take the case.

The state Supreme Court’s order Friday said it would specifically consider the question of whether the Republican voters and GOP groups have standing to bring the lawsuit; whether state law requires ballots to be thrown out if they are undated; and whether the act of rejecting those ballots violates federal civil rights law.

That means the court will, for the first time, consider essentially the entirety of the arguments both sides have presented in state and federal courts.