Voters in the key battleground of Pennsylvania may notice their ballots look different this year, as the state prepares to deploy a new design in the general election for the first time this year that aims to reduce the number of rejected votes.
Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt officially certified the state's ballot for this fall's presidential election Monday after the state Supreme Court upheld a ruling that rejected third-party candidate Cornel West's effort to appear on it, which was the final outstanding legal issue for the ballot.
That cleared the way for counties to start preparing, printing and distributing mail ballots to those who request them. Once they’re available, voters will be able to head to their local election offices and request and cast mail ballots in person.
The new ballot design, which Pennsylvania officials announced last year and was first used in this year’s primary election, was created with the hope of reducing voter errors in a state where tens of thousands of ballots have been rejected in recent years. Mistakes have included forgetting to write the date or leaving the so-called secrecy sleeve out and submitting a “naked ballot.”
According to state officials, 21,800 mail ballots were rejected in the 2020 general election, and about 23,700 mail ballots were rejected in the 2022 general election. Most rejected ballots are tossed out for arriving after Election Day, but thousands have been rejected for missing signatures and similar paperwork errors.
In a critical swing state typically decided by tight margins — Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump by just 81,000 in Pennsylvania in 2020 — rejected ballots can fundamentally shape a race’s outcome. While Pennsylvania created no-excuse mail voting in 2019 with bipartisan support, the process wasn't enacted until the early days of the Covid pandemic in 2020, when Trump baselessly seized on mail voting as rife with fraud.
Pennsylvania's mail ballots have once again been the subject of a major election-year legal battle. Voting rights advocates went to court to try to eliminate a requirement that on-time ballots with missing or inaccurate dates be tossed out, a provision Republicans defended as a component of election integrity. The state Supreme Court ruled last week that mail ballots with improper dates can't be counted.
Pennsylvania's new ballot design will include new instructions and a yellow secrecy sleeve to remind voters to put their ballots inside it. Some counties may put hole punches through ballot envelopes, too, making it easier to spot “naked ballots” ahead of time; the yellow sleeves should be viewable through the hole-punch windows if the ballots are mailed properly.
In hope of preventing voters from writing their birthdays in the date line, the year will be filled in.
In Pennsylvania, counties are permitted to let their voters rectify ballot mistakes like naked ballots or missing signatures, but they aren’t required to. Officials in Dauphin County, home to Harrisburg, for instance, announced a plan this month to allow voters to fix their mail ballot mistakes.
Looking ahead to November, clerks in Pennsylvania still won’t be able to process any mail ballots before Election Day, meaning it could again take days to count them.
