PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — The Philadelphia city commissioners on Wednesday tossed out more than 3,000 mail-in ballots because of defects in the way they were filled out and returned.
More than 2,000 of the ballots had no signature. Nearly 500 had no identity verification. About 1,000 ballots were not inside the secrecy envelope inside the mailing envelope, as required by state law.
When the three commissioners met to vote on which mail-in ballots should count, they agreed some simply could not. Those were the ones that were unsigned or missing identification.
But there was disagreement about whether to count ballots that were not inside the secrecy envelope, or those with smaller defects such as a missing or incorrect date.
Commissioner Lisa Deeley argued that all of those ballots should count.
“The secrecy envelope does not determine when a ballot was received. The secrecy envelope does not determine if a voter is eligible to vote,” she argued.
“I think it is a complete and terrible injustice that we are throwing out otherwise perfectly legitimate votes based on immaterial defects.”