The Morning Call:

A federal appeals court has halted the final count and certification of votes in a narrow race for Lehigh County judge while voters ask the court to reverse a decision throwing out their lawsuit to have their undated ballots counted.

The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Sunday issued a temporary injunction to stop the Lehigh County board of elections from certifying the results of the election for the last of three seats on Lehigh County Court. A group of five voters sued the board claiming they would be unjustifiably denied the right to vote by a decision not to count 257 ballots that were mailed without handwritten signatures on the return envelopes.

The uncounted ballots have the potential to tip the race between the third- and fourth-place candidates for judge. Republican David Ritter has a 74-vote lead against Democrat Zachary Cohen.

Represented by the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, the voters filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Allentown arguing that the law requiring a handwritten date on the return envelope for a mail-in ballot to be counted violates the voting rights provisions of the Civil Rights Act and is unconstitutional.

You can view the district court’s opinion in Migliori v. Lehigh County Board of Elections here. It found no private right of action under the applicable provision of the Civil Rights Act, and it concluded that a requirement of a handwritten date on a ballot envelope was “slight” under the Anderson-Burdick framework.