NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WSMV) – Tennessee has joined an amicus brief led by the State of Missouri urging the Supreme Court to overturn a decision that struck down a Pennsylvania election law.
The brief, filed by 21 states in total, asks that SCOTUS review a federal appellate decision that struck down a Pennsylvania law requiring that voters in the state handwrite the date on mail-in ballots.
File in support of a petition by the Republican National Committee, the brief argues that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit should not have invalidated the Pennsylvania law. They say that doing so “interferes with the authority of state legislatures to regulate elections and oversteps constitutional limits on the judicial role.”
“This should be an easy case,” the brief states. “The challenged Pennsylvania law merely requires voters to write a date in partially pre-filled boxes. The notion that such a mundane and simple requirement violates the right to vote defies common sense.”
It goes on to say that the Third Circuit’s decision “defies logic and sows more chaos into an area of law that urgently needs clarification.”
The Pennsylvania law in question has proven to be contentious, as many people in the state have seen their mail-in votes thrown out or not counted if the date on the envelope was wrong or missing. According to The Public Interest Law Center, thousands of voters have their mail-in ballots rejected every year due to this mistake.
“Election officials do not use the date to determine whether the ballot was returned on time — ballots must be received by county boards of election by 8 p.m. on Election Day, regardless of the date handwritten on the envelope — and the date is not used to determine voter eligibility,” the nonprofit said in 2024. “Nonetheless, this essentially meaningless requirement caused the rejection of at least 10,000 ballots from voters who had submitted their mail-in ballots on time in the 2022 general election.”
The states that filed the amicus brief say that the decision to strike down the law enforcing that handwritten date requirement “undermines federalism and the separation of powers by giving federal courts undue authority over election administration.”
“Democracy only works if people have faith in elections,” Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti said. “Common sense safeguards, like requiring a voter to handwrite a date on a mail-in-ballot envelope, should not be controversial. Courts need to protect the legitimacy of the electoral process, not undermine it.”
Other states included on the nreif include Alabama, Alaska, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas and West Virginia.
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