A federal appeals court says undated Pa. mail ballots should be counted
That was unexpected. 
by Jonathan Lai
Published 42 minutes ago
Pennsylvania mail ballots that were submitted without a date on the envelope last year should be counted, a federal appeals court said Friday, a ruling that could mean thousands more votes get counted in elections moving forward — starting with this past Tuesday’s primary. The ruling will also almost certainly reignite the smoldering political fight over undated mail ballots; create new questions and pressure for county elections officials as they continue to count votes from this week’s primary; and create another potential opening for county-by-county legal challenges as the Senate Republican primary heads toward a likely recount.
The full extent of the decision’s impact is unclear, because the court issued a judgment and said an opinion would come later. The question before the three-judge panel in Philadelphia was whether to count 257 undated mail ballots in Lehigh County from last November’s general election. State law requires voters to sign and date the outside mailing envelope when they return their mail ballots, and state courts have held that the requirement means undated ballots must be rejected.
But throwing out those votes violates the federal Civil Rights Act, the ACLU argued, because the date isn’t actually used in determining the legitimacy of a vote. The group brought the case, Migliori v. Lehigh County Board of Elections, on behalf of five voters whose undated ballots were to be rejected after a separate case wound through state courts.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit judges agreed with that argument Friday, declaring that the date requirement in state law is immaterial under the Civil Rights Act — meaning it can’t be used as a reason for rejecting the ballots. “Accordingly, there is no basis on this record to refuse to count undated ballots that have been set aside in the November 2, 2021, election for Judge of the Common Pleas of Lehigh County,” the judgment reads. The decision has implications that could extend far beyond one election in one county.
(snip)
https://www.inquirer.com/politics/election/undated-mail-ballots-pennsylvania-lehigh-county-migliori-20220520.html
Apparently the effect of this would be immediate and going forward.
= new reply since forum marked as read
and they would be fighting among themselves. 
I really don't want to go backward. It's just too ugly and stressful.
Thank you Third Circuit Court of Appeals Judges!
All of these extraneous "gotchas" like "dates", "naked ballots" (i.e., ballots not returned in their "secrecy envelope" ) and of course "signature match" (using some software to verify or whatever) are designed to throw out the votes of the people who they found have used the mail-in ballots the most - Democrats. 
But guaranteed they would never try to "signature match" the poll books in red polling places that in-person voters have to sign and date.
Was surprised to hear this ruling although I am sure they will appeal to the SCOTUS.
That's why they make us fill out the ballot request form by hand and sign it by hand. Those signatures get scanned into the system, and they are used to ID the signature on your official ballot when you mail it. If the sigs don't match (all done by computer now) then it gets kicked up to the next level. Very little human judgment is required now.
they are "cross-checking" the signature to a driver's license (or other state ID) signature.
I remember a bunch of years ago when I went to vote, the pre-printed "check" signature on the page designated for me to sign, had finally been updated to how I evolved to sign things and I realized that it was pulled from the signature used on my recently-renewed driver's license.
However if you recall the drama in 2020 here when they were counting ballots and finally got around to doing the "provisional" and/or set-aside mail-in ballots late in the week, non-city resident RW zombie squads were demanding to "participate" in "watching" the counting process and to "verify" the signatures.
In fact, there was an infamous pic of the unhinged MAGA loons at one of the Convention Center doors trying to break it down to get in. 
