The Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, Board of Elections voted Tuesday 2-1 to count 2,349 ballots that “appear to be eligible in every way” except for the fact that voters did not place a date on the outer envelope, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review first reported.
Election board staff say the unopened ballots arrived on or before Election Day.
“They applied on time, received their ballots, voted their ballots, returned them on time with their signature, their printed name, their address — the only thing they’re missing is their date,” County Solicitor Andrew Szefi said. “They were received timely, and our … ballot sorting machine imprints a date received on each envelope as they’re scanned.”
“We’ve taken a hard look at this,” he added. “The legal principle at issue here is the Elections Code should always be construed so as to favor enfranchisement over disenfranchisement. What we have here is essentially a technicality that we don’t want voters to get disenfranchised with.”
Elections Manager David Voye said roughly 25,000 ballots remain uncounted, 17,000 of which are provisional ballots.
President Donald Trump‘s re-election campaign filed a lawsuit in Pennsylvania on Monday against the state’s use of mail-in ballots, alleging it created a “two-tier” voting system for the general election — a claim the state vehemently denies.
The lawsuit filed in the Middle District of Pennsylvania names Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar and the election boards of seven counties as defendants, accusing them of holding in-person voters to a different standard than those who submitted their ballots by mail.
The Trump campaign accuses the defendants of removing “all the hallmarks of transparency and verifiability” for those who cast ballots by the mail compared to those who cast theirs in person.
The complaint also accused the defendants of keeping the election “shrouded in secrecy” by providing candidates “no meaningful access or actual opportunity to review and assess mail-ballots.”
The UPI contributed to this report.