Washington County must tell voters if it counted their mail-in ballot, court rules

A Republican-controlled county in Pennsylvania violated state law when election workers refused to tell voters whether their mail-in ballot would be counted in April's primary election, an appeals court ruled Tuesday.

The case is one of several election-related lawsuits being fought in courts in Pennsylvania, a presidential battleground state where November's contest between Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Kamala Harris could be close.

Through a 2-1 decision, the statewide Commonwealth Court panel upheld a Washington County judge's month-old order .

The order requires county employees 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.

It also requires Washington County to allow those voters to vote by provisional ballot.

In the 19-page majority opinion, Judge Michael Wojcik wrote that the county's past policy "emasculates" the law's guarantees that voters can protest the rejection of their ballot and take advantage of the "statutory failsafe" of casting a provisional ballot.

The local NAACP branch, the Center for Coalfield Justice and seven voters whose ballots had been rejected in the April 23 primary sued the county earlier this summer, accusing Washington County of violating the constitutional due process rights of voters by deliberately concealing whether their ballot had been counted.