Домой United States USA — Criminal Supreme Court Won’t Hear Pennsylvania Election Case on Mailed Ballots

Supreme Court Won’t Hear Pennsylvania Election Case on Mailed Ballots

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In dissent, three justices said the court should have used the case to provide guidance in future elections.
The Supreme Court announced on Monday that it would not hear an appeal from Pennsylvania Republicans who sought to disqualify mailed ballots in the 2020 presidential election that arrived after Election Day. The court’s brief order gave no reasons for turning down the case, which as a practical matter marked the end of Supreme Court litigation over the election. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Neil M. Gorsuch dissented, saying the court should have used it to provide guidance in future elections. The dissenting justices acknowledged that the number of ballots at issue in the case was too small to affect President Biden’s victory in the state. But the legal question the case presented — about the power of state courts to revise election laws — was, they said, a significant one that should be resolved without the pressure of an impending election. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled in September that ballots sent before Election Day could be counted if they arrived up to three days after. On two occasions before the election, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to intervene in the case, though several justices expressed doubts about the state court’s power to override the State Legislature, which had set an Election Day deadline for receiving mailed ballots. On Monday, Justice Thomas wrote that the time was now right to take up the case. “At first blush,” he wrote, “it may seem reasonable to address this question when it next arises. After all, the 2020 election is now over, and the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s decision was not outcome determinative for any federal election. But whatever force that argument has in other contexts, it fails in the context of elections.” “Because the judicial system is not well suited to address these kinds of questions in the short time period available immediately after an election,” Justice Thomas wrote, “we ought to use available cases outside that truncated context to address these admittedly important questions.

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