WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court on Friday rejected an appeal by the Republican National Committee and refused to disqualify Pennsylvania voters who sent a mail-in ballot with an error on the envelope.

There were no dissenters.

The decision is a victory for voting rights advocates who have fought the issue in Pennsylvania courts.

They said voters should not lose their right to vote because they made a minor mistake on the mailing envelope.

The court did not issue an opinion explaining its decision. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., in a separate statement, said the Pennsylvania ruling was “controversial” and debatable, but there were procedural reasons not to rule on the matter now.

Conservative Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil M. Gorsuch said they agreed.

In response to the decision, Witold Walczak, legal director of the ACLU of Pennsylvania, said that “a small error that is irrelevant to a person’s eligibility to vote should never interfere with the counting of ballots, and provisional ballots are a decades-old security, a back-up, for voters. We are grateful that the RNC’s argument failed and that voters can rely on provisional ballots as a way to make sure their vote counts.”

The Harris-Walz campaign also applauded the result. “Today’s decision confirms that, for every eligible voter, the right to vote means the right to have your vote counted,” Harris said in a statement.

A decision in favor of the RNC could have affected several thousand voters in a state that is considered pivotal in the presidential race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Trump.

Last week, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court gave legally registered voters a second chance to vote.

In a 4-3 vote, the state justices ruled that voters who sent in a defective mail-in ballot could go to the polls on Election Day and cast a provisional ballot that would be counted.

Trump and Pennsylvania Republicans were highly skeptical of mail-in voting four years ago, arguing it could lead to fraud.
Supreme Court conservatives have also been skeptical of justices making last-minute changes to voting rules.

Monday, the The RNC filed an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court and argued that the state court had “dramatically changed the rules on mail-in voting … in the middle of an ongoing general election.”

They said the Pennsylvania law did not “create a cure for mail-in voting errors.”

Their appeal asked the justices to either overturn the state court’s decision in its entirety or order the “segregation of the affected provisional ballots” so they can be counted separately.

Pennsylvania election officials said the RNC’s claim is wrong. They told the court that many counties provided provisional ballots to voters whose mail-in ballots were defective. They said it would be a dramatic change in the law to repeal this standard practice.

In its 4-3 decision, the state court said voters should not lose their right to vote because a mail-in ballot had an error on the envelope, such as a missing date or signature, or was not mailed in a cover envelope.

State judges agreed that those defective ballots were “void” and could not be counted, but said voters should be allowed to provisionally vote in person.

“What principle of honest voting is violated by recognizing the validity of a ballot cast by a voter,” state Judge Christine Donohue said for the majority.

The ACLU and other voting rights advocates defended that decision in response to the RNC’s appeal.

“The provisional voting process ensures that for each voter, one ballot will be counted – not two ballots and not zero ballots,” they argued.