PHILADELPHIA — A state appellate court on Thursday agreed with Pennsylvania GOP Senate candidate David McCormick and ordered Pennsylvania counties to tally more than 800 undated mail ballots and include them in the vote totals they report for the neck-and-neck Republican primary race between McCormick and Mehmet Oz.
In a 40-page opinion, Renee Cohn Jubelirer, president judge of the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court, described the state's practice of rejecting ballots that arrived without a required handwritten date from the voter on the outer envelope as a potentially unfair restriction of the right to vote.
"The absence of a handwritten date on the exterior envelope could be considered a 'minor irregularity' without a compelling reason that justifies the disenfranchisement of otherwise eligible voters," she wrote.
