Some good news out of the Supreme Court for once. They've ruled against the Republican National Committee that wanted to potentially toss out thousands of Pennsylvania ballots:
On Friday evening, the Supreme Court ruled it would leave in place a Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision that made it marginally easier for certain voters in the state to cast a ballot. The Republican Party had asked the justices to block that decision; doing so would have likely disenfranchised thousands of voters.
But that won’t happen. The Court’s decision in Republican National Committee v. Genser was unanimous, although Justice Samuel Alito wrote a statement indicating that he and Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch are only ruling against the GOP on narrow procedural grounds.
The problem at the heart of the case was that Pennsylvania law is unusually strict regarding how mailed ballots must be returned by voters. They must be stuffed in two envelopes, and if the inner envelope is missing, the ballot is void. The state supreme court decision at issue in Genser ruled that voters who cast such a voided ballot can still vote if they show up on Election Day and cast a provisional ballot.
The bad news, as Steve Vladeck explained on CNN, this may not be the end of it:
VLADECK: And I think it's worth stressing that the one separate opinion we got from the Supreme Court was a statement by Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Justices Thomas and Gorsuch, saying, were not actually deciding very much that there's not a lot we actually can do, given the particular way this case got to the court.
Wolf, if Pennsylvania turns out to be razor thin, where a small category of provisional ballots like what were seeing in these cases might make the difference, this order does not tell us how the Supreme Court would deal with that issue a week, two weeks, three weeks from now. It just says we're not stepping in today. If Pennsylvania turns out super close, I think were going to see a rerun of this very dispute, you know, on the far side of the election as well.
