The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit against Washington County, Pennsylvania, alleging that 259 voters were “disenfranchised” after errors were made in their mail-in ballots for the presidential primary.
According to the ACLU, the lawsuit, filed on behalf of seven voters, the Washington chapter of the NAACP and the environmental group Caulfield Center for Justice, came after the Washington County Board of Elections “concealed from voters errors they made on their mail-in ballot return envelopes ahead of the 2024 primary election and determined that their votes would not be counted.”
“Voters were not informed of the error and had no opportunity to correct it by requesting a new mail-in ballot or casting a provisional ballot at their polling place,” the ACLU said in a statement.
A Washington County spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fox News Digital on Monday.
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An election worker flattens ballots during the 2024 Pennsylvania primary election at an election warehouse in Philadelphia. (Hannah Beyer/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
The lawsuit, filed in Washington County District Court, says the incident represents “fundamentally unfair and egregious conduct by the Washington County Board of Elections, rising to the level of a violation of due process under the Pennsylvania Constitution.”
“In April 2024, the Washington County Board of Elections voted 2-1 to adopt a mail-in ballot policy that knowingly conceals information about voters who make disqualifying errors on their mail-in ballot envelopes,” the report states. “The board’s decision completely reversed previous policies that notified voters of errors on their ballot envelopes, such as missing signatures or incomplete dates, and gave them the opportunity to correct the errors.”
“To the contrary, in the weeks leading up to the April 2024 election, the Commission implemented a systematic process to determine which mail-in ballots would not be counted, to conceal that information from voters and the public, and, in many cases, to actively mislead voters into believing that their mail-in ballots would be counted,” the lawsuit continues.
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American Civil Liberties Union logo (Karen Breyer/AFP via Getty Images)
The commission alleges that it “knowingly entered information into Pennsylvania’s State of Pennsylvania Unified Register of Electors (SURE) system that made it appear as if the commission had received defective mail-in ballots when in fact the commission had already withheld those ballots and planned to not count them,” and then “instructed elections employees not to provide any information to voters who inquired about the status of their mail-in ballots, including whether they had made any errors that would cause their votes to not be counted.”
The ACLU alleges that 259 voters in Washington County were “disenfranchised” by the way their primary ballots were handled. President Biden and former President Trump were seen debate in Georgia last week. (Kyle Mazza/Anadolu via Getty Images)
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According to the ACLU, the plaintiffs in the lawsuit are seeking a court order to force the county to stop its “cover-up” practices.[ing] By obtaining “information about errors made by voters on their mail-in ballot return envelopes” and entering the appropriate data into the state’s system for future elections, “voters will be automatically notified of disqualifying errors on their mail-in ballots before Election Day.”
