So the appeals court ruled that PA cannot allow "curing of votes" after Nov 9. The SoS had originally allowed it to go on until the 12th, so this is a "win" for Trump. Kind of. But not much.
First the law:
Federal Law allows voters to fix their ballots for mistakes, like incorrect birthdays or addresses (I saw an example, perhaps in another state, which said that the address had to be hand-written. Which means if you used a pre-printed return address label, it would not qualify; the law allows voters to come in and fix that, and they are allowed to hand-write their address to make the ballot acceptable. Sinister, right?)
The PA supreme court said that this can be done until 6 days after election day. So Nov 9, right? Well, not for sure.
The SoS argued that since mail-in ballots can be accepted if they arrive by Friday, that would be the date to base it on, so she said ballots could be cured until Nov 12.
The court has ruled that, no, that date is Nov 9.
OK, so what does that mean?
It means they aren't allowed to count 1) mail-in ballots with errors that 2) the voter tried to correct after Nov 9.
I haven't seen the official confirmation, but the reports I've seen have said that these votes have not actually been included in the totals yet. So that means that Pennsylvania will not add those votes to the current vote. It will not result in taking any votes away from the current totals (Biden leads by 60K).
Finally, the media has mostly dropped the ball on this, and failed to ask the important question: how many votes are we talking about? The only thing they are saying is to parrot from the press release, which says "It is not enough votes to affect the outcome of the election." That is an understatement.
1) They are not present in the current totals
2) Since they are mail-in votes, they would likely be largely Biden votes, so including them would only make the spread bigger, and
3) How many votes are we talking about anyway?
Remember, these are only mail-in ballots that a) have errors b) that were not corrected by Nov 9 and c) that the voter intended to fix. So what, a dozen, maybe? In the whole state?
I have seen one journalist do their job on this. They asked and they learned that the number of ballots that would be affected in Alleghany county is 0.
