Voting Cases Stemming From 2020, 2022 Elections Drag Into 2024 This Week

With nine months left until the 2024 elections, two high-profile voting-related cases will be moving through courts in Pennsylvania and Michigan, stemming from the 2020 and 2022 elections.On Tuesday, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals will consider a case concerning whether voters who use mail-in ballots need to put accurate, handwritten dates on the outsides of their envelopes. The case was heard at trial by Judge Susan Paradise Baxter, an appointee of President Trump, at the Western District of Pennsylvania. She ruled that the ballots in question ought to be counted. However, the ruling was put on hold in order to let the appeals process play out.At issue in the case, initially filed in November 2022, is whether voters who submit their ballots in time for an election but do not have dates or do not have the correct dates on the outsides of their return envelopes should have their votes counted.Judge Baxter ruled that disqualifying a vote on the basis of the ballot envelope having an inaccurate date or no date was a violation of the Civil Rights Act. “The handwritten-date requirement is completely irrelevant and unnecessary because elections officials know whether the ballot was received on time,” the director of the ACLU of Pennsylvania, Witold Wlczak, said of the ruling in a statement. “And the whole point of this provision in the Civil Rights Act was to stop states from disqualifying votes for frivolous reasons, like this date requirement.”The Republican National Committee and some other Republican organizations have joined the case in opposition to counting undated ballots, though, and they are expected to attempt to appeal the case to the Supreme Court.In a filing in a similar case concerning undated ballots from the 2022 election, a case that was dismissed as moot because the election was resolved by the time it made it to the Supreme Court, Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch indicated that they thought Pennsylvania could discount undated ballots.The question of undated ballots could prove important in the 2024 presidential election. In Pennsylvania, more than 69 percent of all mail-in votes are cast by Democrats, according to the United States Elections Project, and thus tossing undated ballots would likely have a disproportionate impact on Democratic vote totals.In Michigan, a hearing will be held ahead of the criminal trial of a former GOP state attorney general candidate, Matthew DePerno, lawyer Stefanie Lambert, and a former GOP state representative, Daire Rendon. The case concerns an alleged plot involving five voting machines being taken from three counties to a hotel room where investigators found they had been broken into and that “tests” had been conducted on them.Mr. DePerno was charged with undue possession of a voting machine and Ms. Rendon and Ms. Lambert were charged with multiple felonies in association with the alleged stealing of a voting machine.Mr. DePerno, before he was a candidate for attorney general in 2022, was one of Mr. Trump’s surrogates in Michigan for his efforts to challenge the state’s results in the 2020 election. Mr. Deperno’s attorney, Paul Stablein, argues that the charges are “unfounded.”“He maintains his innocence and firmly believes that these charges are not based upon any actual truth and are motivated primarily by politics rather than evidence,” Mr. Stablein said in a statement. “He is confident that justice will prevail, and he looks forward to the date when his innocence will be demonstrated in a court of law.”Aside from allegedly taking voting machines, Mr. DePerno also challenged the results in Michigan’s Antrim County in a lawsuit, claiming that human errors in election administration were evidence of hacking, and helped fundraise for efforts to overturn election results elsewhere.These efforts aided Mr. DePerno’s rise to prominence in the Michigan GOP and Mr. Trump endorsed him in the state’s attorney general race in 2021.Ms. Rendon was also active in efforts to challenge the 2020 election results in Michigan and in June 2021 claimed to possess evidence “reflecting systemic election fraud in Michigan,” though she has not produced it.

Voting Cases Stemming From 2020, 2022 Elections Drag Into 2024 This Week

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