Republicans wasted no time appealing a Pennsylvania court ruling that would relax mail-in voting rules, asking the state Supreme Court on Thursday to overturn a lower court. published a day earlier.

The state and national GOP filed a emergency request that the justices suspended a Commonwealth Court ruling that the envelopes voters use to send their mail-in ballots do not need to be hand-dated, as required by state law. State.

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

The Commonwealth Court, in a 3-2 decision, said 69 absentee ballots with no dates or inaccurate dates should be counted in two special elections for the Philadelphia State House of Representatives held in september.

The justices emphasized that they were ruling on an election that had already taken place – and involved unopposed candidates – but there is uncertainty over how that might apply to current elections. Pennsylvania is the largest swing state in the tight presidential race, and its voters also hold a seat in the U.S. Senate, three shared statewide offices and most of the Legislature.

The rules for voting by mail in Pennsylvania have often been pleaded in state and federal courts since absentee and mail-in ballots were authorized for all registered voters by the Legislature in 2019, on the eve of the pandemic. In March, the 3rd U.S. Court of Appeals said the requirement for an exact handwritten date was enforceable, and in April the state redesigned the envelopes to make it harder for voters to make attendance errors. The state Supreme Court last month denied an effort to eliminate the dating requirement, and said on October 5 that it would. do not revisit the question.

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

“Without this court’s intervention, county boards will likely count undated ballots that the General Assembly has declared should not be counted,” they wrote in the brief filed Thursday. They cautioned that the uniform date requirement could be applied in different ways across the state.

“There is no excuse – none – for the majority to rush to invalidate the date set by the General Assembly less than a week before the 2024 general election,” they wrote in the emergency request extraordinary measures.

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

In two decisions over the past 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 substantially changed “pending pending elections”.

The majority of the Commonwealth Court said the requirement for specific dates on the outer envelope, which is not necessary to determine whether a ballot arrived on time, runs counter to the constitutional provision of the State according to which elections must be free and equal and no civil or military power can interfere with the “free exercise of the right of suffrage”.