A Republican-controlled county in Pennsylvania violated state law when election workers refused to tell voters that their mail-in ballot had been rejected and wouldn’t be counted in last April’s primary election, a judge ruled.
As a result, voters in Washington County were unable to exercise their legal right either to challenge the decision of the county elections board or to cast a provisional ballot in place of the rejected mail-in ballot, the judge said….
n his decision Friday, Judge Brandon Neuman ordered Washington County to notify any voter whose mail-in ballot is rejected because of an error — such as a missing signature or missing handwritten date — so that the voter has an opportunity to challenge the decision.
Neuman, elected as a Democrat, also ordered the county to allow those voters to vote by provisional ballot to help ensure they could cast a ballot that would be counted.
In the primary, the county rejected 259 mail-in ballots that had been received before polls closed, or 2% of all mail-in ballots received on time, the judge wrote. Roughly three-fourths of mail-in ballots tend to be cast by Democrats in Pennsylvania, possibly the result of Trump baselessly claiming for years that mail-in voting is rife with fraud….