Last week, several lawsuits in Pennsylvania clarified the rules for voting by mail there. In a wordmail-in ballots will still be rejected in the primary battleground if voters fail to correctly date the statement accompanying the ballot — but voters who make any mistakes on the mail-in ballot will be able to vote by provisional ballot instead of on Election Day.
The NBC News Decision Desk looked at how many mail-in ballots remain pending in the state, as well as how many have already been identified as missing by counties. In the event of a close race in Pennsylvania, provisional ballots and their counting will receive much attention after Tuesday night.
Voters with mail-in ballots must have their ballots received by election officials by 8 p.m. Tuesday for the vote to be counted. However, voters who have run out of or are missing postal ballots can also go to polling stations to vote in person.
The data clearly shows that the majority of provisional ballots are likely to come from voters with mail-in ballots, rather than voters who returned a missing mail-in ballot. They also make it clear that these provisional ballots could favor Vice President Kamala Harris and her party.
Information about postal ballots and potential temporary ballots
In total, approximately 2.2 million Pennsylvanians have a certified mail-in ballot application public information From the Secretary of State of Pennsylvania. According to the latest figures released on Monday, about 82% have so far returned their postal ballot. This means that approximately 390,000 postal ballots are unpaid.
If Pennsylvania is watching the 2024 election The same trend we see in 2022this means that approximately 150,000 more postal ballots will arrive in time to be counted, either by post or through the box. The rest of the people with selected postal ballots must vote in person on polling day for their votes to be counted. If these voters show up and hand in their postal ballots, they can vote by regular ballot; otherwise, they will vote by provisional ballot, which election officials will count only after confirming that the original mail-in ballot was not counted.
In 2022, about one-third of voters who requested but did not return mail-in ballots eventually voted in person. Taking 2022 as a guide, we expect about 90,000 people to vote in person and about 35,000 to use provisional ballots.
Given that prominent mail-in ballots are disproportionately cast by registered Democrats, we expect these provisional ballots to give Democratic candidates some additional votes that won’t be reflected in vote totals until a few days after Election Day.
It’s harder to predict how many mail-in ballots will be rejected tomorrow when election officials begin examining them. Pennsylvania doesn’t just reject mail-in ballots when voters fail to sign or date correctly statement on the outside of return envelopes or enclose ballots in inner privacy envelopes, but Pennsylvania also prohibits “cutting” or opening mail ballots before Election Day.
Some states identify missing statements or missing confidential envelopes before opening the mail ballots until Election Day, but others leave the task until Election Day. As a result, we cannot tell the true status of postal ballots in some states.
In all, our panel of statewide data available for the day shows 5,524 deficient mail ballots as of Monday — 2,258 had no signatures, 2,471 had dates or the wrong date, and 795 had no privacy folders. The data also shows that about 4,400 voters used county-specific policies to “cure” or correct problematic mail-in ballots.
In countries where we would expect election officials to check mailed ballots returned to date for any authentication or privacy issues, only about 0.8% of mailed ballots were ever recorded as missing. If that’s true, we expect just under 20,000 mail-in ballots in the state — but the shortage rate may be higher in other counties.
Voters who have returned a missing mail-in ballot and have not yet corrected it can usually vote on Election Day by provisional ballot. Those provisional ballots will be counted, according to a state Supreme Court ruling last week.
However, at least in 2022, relatively few voters took advantage of this option. At the same time, as mentioned above, about 35,000 people can vote provisionally after not returning their postal ballots at all.
Looking ahead, we expect there will be a lot of discussion on election night and the days after about provisional ballots filed by people requesting mail-in ballots. Future litigation may be reconsidering, again, whether provisional ballots issued by people who previously returned a missing mail ballot should be counted.
But from the perspective of the margin of victory in Pennsylvania, it’s important to consider that many more provisional ballots will be cast by people who never return their mail-in ballots, meaning those ballots are free of any legal uncertainty.