The rise in election cases in Pennsylvania shows why it’s a top prize

Pennsylvania is emerging as the jackpot in the hotly contested presidential race, with both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris waging frenzied campaigning on the eve of the election, along with a wave of lawsuits from both sides.

Pennsylvania’s 19 Electoral College votes are the most among the seven swing states that will effectively determine the winner of Tuesday’s election. And the state has become a hotbed of lawsuits from both sides trying to gain some benefit beyond their get-out-the-vote efforts.

An attempt by the Republican Party to prevent potentially tens of thousands of mail-in ballots from being counted was rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday. Republicans won another case over ballots missing handwritten dates in Pennsylvania’s highest court. And a judge is considering whether to block Elon Musk’s daily $1 million giveaway to voters

The excessive focus on Pennsylvania is the result of the idiosyncrasies of the Electoral College that decides the US presidential elections. The mysterious system that allows whoever captures a state to win all its voters can spotlight a single state — or several — allowing one candidate or the other to win more than 270 voters to win the presidency.

The 2024 election focused on Pennsylvania, and to a lesser extent Georgia, one of seven states most likely considered a toss-up in the polls. Georgia has been a flashpoint for election allegations since 2020, when President Joe Biden won the state by fewer than 12,000 votes and Trump made baseless accusations of voter fraud.

So far, the 2024 lawsuits have focused on the types of disputes typical of hotly contested presidential elections.

The U.S. Supreme Court late Friday rejected the Republican Party’s attempt to prevent Pennsylvanians from getting a second chance to vote if their mail-in ballots are rejected as incomplete.

Republicans appealed after Pennsylvania’s highest court ruled that the state must count provisional ballots cast by voters whose mail-in ballots were disqualified because they did not put an inner envelope around the ballot due to secrecy — commonly called “naked” ballots.

Pennsylvania was also at the center of election disputes in 2020, when conservative U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito ordered late-arriving ballots set aside amid a fight over whether those votes would count. State officials later said that fewer than 10,000 ballots had been received in a disputed three-day period — not nearly enough to wipe out Biden’s margin of victory of 80,555 votes.

The Trump campaign filed a lawsuit on October 29 alleging that Bucks County election officials improperly turned away voters who were waiting in line to request a ballot and fill it out and complete it at the same time to vote, a process known as “on demand” absentee voting.

The lawsuit followed allegations from Trump supporters on social media that after waiting in long lines, they were told to leave without receiving ballots. County officials said in social media posts that there was a “miscommunication” and that some people in line were “briefly told they could not be accommodated.”

A judge quickly extended the deadline by two days, ruling that the county had violated state election law. The county, located near Philadelphia and with a population of about 600,000, had no objection to extending the deadline.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court sided with Republicans late last week in a lawsuit over missing dates on ballots that were otherwise valid, preventing them from being counted in the 2024 election. The case challenged a rule adopted by Pennsylvania lawmakers passed and required voters to write the current date on their ballot envelope. Without this, the votes will not be counted.

An intermediate appeals court ruled on Oct. 30 that the ballot dating provision constituted an unconstitutional barrier to voting, resulting in the “unwarranted rejection of thousands of timely ballots.”

The RNC appealed, arguing that the ruling effectively changed voting rules too early before Election Day and undermined election integrity. The RNC also argued that the lower court erred in finding that the date requirement limits “fundamental voting rights.”

The Musk case is not about typical election claims about voting procedures or vote counting, but shows how unusual the 2024 election has been. Philadelphia’s district attorney is challenging daily giveaways from Musk’s Trump-supporting America PAC to randomly selected signatories of a petition calling for freedom of speech and the right to bear arms.

Judge Angelo Foglietta is expected to rule quickly after a hearing Monday on the legality of the giveaway. While the winner must be a registered voter, the contest does not specify which prospective voters should be cast their votes.

The Georgia Supreme Court is considering an emergency appeal from the RNC challenging the counting of 3,000 last-minute absentee ballots sent to voters in Cobb County, an Atlanta suburb, if they arrive after Nov. 5. On Friday, a state court judge ordered the county must extend the deadline and send voters’ ballots overnight with prepaid express return by Nov. 8 — three days after Election Day.

On Sunday, the RNC also filed a federal lawsuit in Savannah seeking to prevent Fulton County and six other Georgia counties from allowing advance voting on weekends and Mondays. The RNC and the Georgia Republican Party claimed the practice violated state law.

Georgia’s election law explicitly allows counties to accept returned ballots during this period, and the Democratic National Committee argued this way in lawsuits.

With help from Greg Stohr.

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