Pennsylvania Supreme Court Rules Provisional Ballots Allowed If Mail-In

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The 4-3 decision means that provisional ballots will be allowed as a cure over the cure currently outlined in state law.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that voters whose mail-in ballots are spoiled because they are not delivered in the required secrecy envelope, known as a “naked ballot,” must be allowed a provisional ballot on election day.

The 4-3 decision upholds a previous ruling by a lower court, which granted voters a chance to cure a spoiled mail-in ballot in Pennsylvania, a critical swing state.

The state high court’s ruling allows voters whose mail-in ballots are rejected—often for failing to include the required secrecy envelope—to vote provisionally at their polling location on Election Day.

Justice Christine Donohue wrote the majority opinion.

“Absent any other disqualifying irregularities, the provisional ballots were to be counted if there were no other ballots attributable to the Electors. There were none,” Donohue wrote in the opinion.

Justice Sallie Mundy, in her dissenting opinion, said the law governing mail-in voting is “not ambiguous,” and that the majority exceeded the bounds of statutory interpretation and supplanted the power of the General Assembly to regulate elections.

“No-excuse, universal mail-in voting is a voting method prescribed by the Legislature,” Mundy wrote in her dissent.

The Republican Party has said that it wants voters and administrators to follow the state’s current voting laws, and that according to the law, the solution to cure a spoiled mail-in ballot is for the county Bureau of Elections to help voters sign an attestation to correct the lack of a signature, which is “not the same as casting a provisional ballot.”

The case stems from two voters in Butler County whose mail-in ballots were disqualified in the 2024 primary for lacking secrecy envelopes. Despite the rejection of their mail-in ballots, both voters attempted to vote provisionally in person on Election Day. The Butler County Board of Elections denied those ballots, prompting the legal battle.

The Republican National Committee (RNC) and the Republican Party of Pennsylvania argued in court filings that once a mail-in ballot is submitted, even if defective, a voter cannot cast a provisional ballot, as curing the defect is not provided for under Pennsylvania’s voting laws.

A trial court determined that the provisional ballots were correctly rejected but an appeals court overturned that ruling, deciding that they should have been counted. Republicans subsequently appealed the decision to Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court found that under the Pennsylvania Election Code, provisional ballots should be counted when a voter’s initial mail-in ballot is void due to a defect, such as the absence of a secrecy envelope. The court emphasized that a voided mail-in ballot does not disqualify the voter’s provisional ballot because it is not considered a validly “cast” ballot.

This decision marks a legal loss for the RNC and the Pennsylvania Republican Party.

According to the Pennsylvania Department of State, more than 1.1 million mail-in ballots have already been returned in Pennsylvania with two weeks remaining until Election Day. Hundreds of thousands more have requested mail ballots.