In a pair of decisions published Saturday evening the Pennsylvania Supreme Court denied requests to resolve questions about the commonwealth’s vote-by-mail law in the final few weeks before the Nov. 5 presidential election.

Dismissing a request by the voting rights groups to block the enforcement of a rule requiring mail-in ballots to bear a handwritten date on the return envelope, the Supreme Court said the risk of confusing voters with a change in voting rules was too great.

“This Court will neither impose nor countenance substantial alterations to existing laws and procedures during the pendency of an ongoing election,” the unsigned order said.

Chief Justice Debra Todd filed a dissenting statement in which she argued that voters and election officials need guidance in the upcoming election.

“We ought to resolve this important constitutional question now, before ballots may be improperly rejected and voters disenfranchised,” Todd said.

The court also rejected a request by the Republican National Committee and the Republican Party of Pennsylvania to stop county election officials from allowing voters to remedy mistakes on their mail-in ballots that would cause them to be disqualified. 

The flurry of weekend rulings exactly a month before Election Day leaves the rules in place during the April 23 primary unchanged.

That means voters casting ballots by mail in this election must complete the voter declaration on the outside of the return envelope by signing and dating it for their ballot to be counted. 

Voters using mail-in ballots should also be certain to place the ballot in the unmarked secrecy envelope before placing it in the return envelope, as that is an error that can lead to a ballot being disqualified.

Counties where the boards of elections have adopted so-called “notice and cure” policies may notify voters of errors and allow them to fix their mistakes before polls close on Election Day. The American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania this week published a guide to such policies in all 67 counties.

The court said the RNC and Pennsylvania GOP had demonstrated a lack of due diligence by failing to pursue the challenge to “notice and cure” policies earlier.  The Republican organizations had asked the court to exercise its King’s Bench authority to hear the case without first litigating it in the lower courts, a power generally reserved for exceptionally urgent cases.

“King’s Bench jurisdiction will not be exercised where, as here, the alleged need for timely intervention is created by Petitioners’ own failure to proceed expeditiously and thus, the need for timely intervention has not been demonstrated,” the order said.  

In a footnote, the court said the Republican parties had also raised the issue before the 2022 midterm election but the Commonwealth Court dismissed the case for a lack of jurisdiction.

“Three election cycles have since passed, and the Petitioners have not challenged any of the county notice and cure policies in a court of common pleas,” the order said.

Justice Kevin Brobson said in a separate statement that he agrees that it is too close to the election for the court to decide the question

“Deciding these questions at this point would, in my view, be highly disruptive to county election administration,” Brobson wrote, adding that it would be difficult for the court to hear evidence and testimony in such a short timeframe.

Earlier Saturday, the court granted an appeal by the RNC and the RPP challenging a Commonwealth Court ruling last month requiring election officials in Washington County to notify voters when their mail-in ballots are rejected and allow them to vote provisionally at their polling places on Election Day.

The Washington County board of elections had adopted a policy days before last April’s primary of marking ballots as “received” in the state ballot tracking system when they had actually been segregated due to a disqualifying error.

Act 77 of 2019 introduced changes to the Election Code, including allow voters to cast ballots by mail without an excuse for not going to the polls. Mistakes by voters completing their ballot packets have been the subject of challenges in every election since. A study estimated that more than 10,000 voters were disenfranchised in the primary election because of such errors.

Proceedings in several courts since 2020, when no-excuse mail voting was first an option, have established that the date on the outside of the envelopes serves no official purpose. 

The Commonwealth Court ruled last month that the dating requirement violates the Pennsylvania Constitution because it serves no compelling reason for the government to infringe upon the charter’s guarantee of the right to vote.

BUTLER, Pa. (AP) — Thousands of supporters returned to Butler, Pennsylvania, on Saturday to rally around Donald Trump at the same site where a gunman tried to assassinate him in July.

Trump’s campaign predicted that tens of thousands would attend the event, billed as a “tribute to the American spirit,” and hundreds were lining up as the sun rose. Speakers who took the stage ahead of the GOP nominee — who has characterized his return as a fulfillment of “an obligation” to Butler — recalled the details of the July 13 shooting, praised the former president’s courage and said God protected him that day, something Trump has also suggested about his surviving the attempt.

There were numerous references and tributes to Corey Comperatore, who died at the July rally as he shielded family members from gunfire. His fireman’s jacket was set up on display surrounded by flowers, an artist created a patriotic rendering of the former fire chief live on stage, and Comperatore’s sisters wiped tears from their eyes as their brother was honored from the stage.

A visibly heightened security presence surrounded the site, with men in camouflage uniforms stationed on roofs with large guns. The building from which shots were fired in July was completely obscured by tractor-trailers, a large grassy perimeter and a fence, featuring Trump’s image from the previous rally. Other tweaks included most bleacher seats being arranged at the sides, rather behind the stage.

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A Pennsylvania school district has reversed course and boarded up window openings it recently installed that allowed people in a middle school hallway to peer into two gender-neutral-designated bathrooms, the superintendent said Friday.

The two windows were installed in recent weeks following a vote in August of the South Western School District’s conservative-majority school board, a move the board president said was designed to monitor and prevent misbehavior. Such openings weren’t installed in any of the school’s non-gender-neutral bathrooms.

The openings were covered by plywood on Thursday on the advice of lawyers from the Harrisburg-based Independence Law Center, a conservative legal group the board consulted before ordering the windows installed, Superintendent Jay Burkhart said.

“I believe that we have to protect all of our students,” Burkhart said in a phone interview. “Students are entitled to privacy and I don’t want to violate that.”

The board “has been targeting transgender students and stripping away their rights for a while,” said Kristina Moon, a lawyer with the Philadelphia-based Education Law Center, which has asked affected students to reach out to it. She said the “multiple tiers and assignments” of bathrooms “overcomplicated a nonissue,” stigmatizing students.

“Now they’ve cut actual holes for windows into the student bathrooms — but only the bathrooms they expect trans and nonbinary children to use. This is a horrifying violation of children’s privacy and cruel discrimination targeted against trans and nonbinary kids,” Moon said in an emailed statement.

The mother of an eighth-grader at Emory H. Markle Middle School in Hanover said Friday that she considered the decision to cover up the windows “a small victory.”

Jennifer Holahan, who drew attention to the bathroom window openings by posting a photo on social media, said she’s “nervous to see” what happens at a meeting next week of the conservative-majority school board.

“This has been a continuing agenda that they’ve had,” Holahan said in a phone interview. “They’ve proved this more than once. I think this is the first time that the school board president has been shut down. And I just wonder what’s to come from that.”

School board president Matthew A. Gelazela, elected as a Libertarian in 2021, told a reporter seeking comment Friday that he considered the call to be criminal harassment and abruptly hung up.

Earlier this week, Gelazela issued a statement defending the bathroom windows as a safety improvement — that “in making the area outside of stalls more viewable, we are better able to monitor for a multitude of prohibited activities such as any possible vaping, drug use, bullying or absenteeism,” the Evening Sun of Hanover reported.

Gelazela’s statement also warned students that they should not consider the bathroom areas outside of the toilet stalls to be private.

Markle Middle School Principal Wes Winters directed questions about the bathroom windows to Gelazela. Board member Justin Lighty declined to discuss the matter, while several other board members and the board’s lawyer didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

In an emailed statement, the ACLU of Pennsylvania described the school board’s policy as discriminatory and one that makes children less safe. The South Western School District has about 4,400 students.

The York Dispatch reported this week that the board has been looking into LGBTQ+ students and bathrooms for more than a year, acting on concerns from unspecified people to establish five bathroom categories: male and female based on sex assigned at birth, male and female based on gender identity, and single-user facilities that are deemed gender neutral.

Gelazela said during an Aug. 14 board meeting that the windows were part of bathroom changes meant to bolster privacy, the Dispatch reported. The vote was 6-3 in favor of adding the windows, though the Evening Sun reported that work had already begun when the vote was taken.

Holahan said the window openings not only allowed people in the hallway to peer into the bathrooms, they also let noises from the bathrooms be heard. Burkhart, the superintendent, said the two gender neutral bathrooms have not been a particular problem for the type of misbehavior Gelazela cited. The renovations cost $8,700, Burkhart said.

At least 11 states have adopted laws barring transgender girls and women from using girls and women’s bathrooms at public schools, and in some cases other government facilities.

As for Pennsylvania, the Education Law Center wrote in a January analysis that federal appeals courts have ruled students have a right to use bathrooms and locker rooms aligned with their gender identity. Moon, a senior lawyer for the center, said all children have the right to use an easily accessible bathroom convenient to their classes that affords them true privacy and does not discriminate based on sex and gender identity.