HARRISBURG, Pa. – Republicans wasted no time challenging a Pennsylvania court ruling that would loosen rules for mail-in ballots, asking the state Supreme Court on Thursday to overturn a lower court opinion. issued a day earlier.

The state and national GOP filed a emergency request that the justices stayed a Commonwealth Court ruling that the envelopes voters use to send mail-in ballots did not have to be accurately dated, as required by state law.

Republican groups said that if the high court does not suspend the order, it should at least amend it to say it is not in effect for the vote that ends Tuesday.

The Commonwealth Court, in a 3-2 decision, said 69 mail-in ballots that were missing or inaccurately dated should be counted in two special elections for the Philadelphia state House of Representatives held in September.

The judges pointed out that they were ruling on elections that had already taken place – and involved unopposed candidates – but there was uncertainty about how they might apply to ongoing elections. Pennsylvania is the largest swing state in the close presidential race, and its voters also hold one U.S. Senate seat, three statewide statewide offices and most of the legislature.

Rules for mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania have been common in litigation in state and federal courts as absentee and mail-in ballots were allowed for all registered voters by the Legislature in 2019 on the eve of the pandemic. In March, the Third US Circuit Court of Appeals said the requirement of an exact, handwritten date was enforceable, and in April the state redesigned the envelopes to make it difficult for voters to make dating mistakes. state Supreme Court last month DENIED an effort to eliminate the meeting requirement and said on Oct. 5 that it would did not see again problem.

The Republican National Committee and the Pennsylvania Republican Party argued that the decision was too close to Election Day, that county election boards should have been allowed to intervene, and the state Supreme Court recently ruled otherwise on the same topic.

“Without this court’s intervention, county boards will likely count undated ballots that the General Assembly said should not be counted,” they wrote in the filing Thursday. They cautioned that the uniform date requirement may be applied differently across the state.

“There is no excuse — not one — for the majority to rush to invalidate the requirement for the date of the General Assembly less than a week before the 2024 general election,” they wrote in the emergency request for extraordinary relief.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court gave the other parties until early Friday to respond.

In two decisions in the last two months, the state supreme court left the outer envelope date mandate in place and indicated that the high court did not want existing laws or procedures to be changed in substantial ways “during an ongoing election.”

A majority of the Commonwealth Court said that the requirement of exact dates on the outer envelopes, which are not necessary to determine whether a ballot arrived on time, ran afoul of the state’s constitutional provision that elections be free and equal and no civil power or military cannot interfere with the “free exercise of the right to vote”.