Why won’t the dated-envelope lawsuits die?

PLEASE JUST STOP.

On Monday, U.S. District Judge Susan Paradise Baxter ruled Pennsylvania’s election boards cannot invalidate mail-in ballots because they don’t have dates on their outer envelopes.

Baxter is not the first judge to weigh in on this issue. She’s not the second or third or fourth. She is just the latest.

It is the most recent volley in a war that has been going on since 2020.

When Act 77 was passed in 2019, it did several things. It required paper trails for voting machines. It eliminated one-button straight ticket voting. It also opened up the idea of mail-in ballots to more than just those who were out of town or laid up in a hospital bed or otherwise incapable of physically reaching a polling place.

There has been little problem with those voting machines. The ability to check the paper trails has been a good thing. Eliminating the one-button straight ticket voting has not prevented anyone from continuing to give votes to all the Republicans or Democrats on a ballot.

But those mail-in ballots have been a continued point of contention since the 2020 primary.

Without graphs and charts and a whiteboard, it’s all but impossible to detail the number of lawsuits, rulings, appeals, additional rulings, further appeals, contradictory rulings and definitive lines in the sand that have happened over the ensuing years. Multiple cases filed by people and organizations on both sides of the issue have made the journey up and down the ladders of Pennsylvania and federal courts.

This is not even Baxter’s first go at the issue. She previously has weighed in on a different case regarding the same envelopes but debating a different point of law. While she reached the same decision, it was reversed on appeal.

This time she called the demand for the date a burden on the right to vote and decided “there is no valid state interest to weigh this against.”

At what point does someone ask when this ends? While Republicans and their groups argue the date combats voter fraud and Democrats and their groups argue invalidating ballots steals the right to vote, no one addresses the separate issue of the lawsuits.

The legal challenges themselves, challenges brought by both sides, are serving no one. They lead to confusion. They create friction. They cost money that has to be better spent on things like helping people register to vote and teaching them to properly fill out a ballot.

While people may know about the ballot-dating cases, even those who follow them closely —like journalists — have to check back to see exactly where which case stands to see what the latest decisions by the court are. How is that beneficial to the voters? How does that prevent fraud?

It is likely this ruling, as other rulings, will be appealed. Should it be? Hard to say. But to not appeal would be to admit defeat. The issue of dated ballots is, more than anything, a game of chicken in which both sides are happy to crash and burn rather than stop fighting. It is the essence of politics distilled for the courts.

“Absent from the record, however, is any evidence demonstrating how this requirement furthers that purported interest,” Baxter wrote of the dating.

She might just as well have been writing about the lawsuits themselves.