This was the outcome of a state appeals court decision on Thursday in a case not involving the Trump or Biden campaigns. A local Republican candidate had brought suit to invalidate 2349 mail-in ballots in Allegheny Count which the Allegheny County Board of Elections counted even though the voters had failed to put a date on the envelope at the time he/she signed the declaration.

A trial court judge had ruled that the failure by the voter was technical, and the Election Board had it within its discretion to count the ballot which was otherwise appropriate filled out and sent to the Elections Board.

The appeals court reversed and ordered that the ballots not be counted. Allegheny County voted in favor of Joe Biden 59.4 to 39.1%. It was not reported how many of the invalidated ballots had votes for Biden and how many had votes for Trump.

Yesterday the Pennsylvania Supreme Court agreed to hear a similar case out of Philadelphia County that was brought by the Trump Campaign. That case involves over 8000 mail-in ballots where the voter did not properly complete the information required on the outer envelope. A trial court judge in Philadephia ruled that the Elections Board had the discretion to accept the ballots and count the votes. The Trump Campaign was preparing to appeal that ruling when the Pennsylvania Supreme Court stepped in at the request of the State given the short time remaining before the State must certify the election results in order to name the electors for the Electoral College.

The decision from the appeals court on the missing dates is significant because of the language used by the majority in the opinion.

This is the very argument that the Trump campaign was making in the case filed in federal court last week — that the seven County Board of Elections named as defendants in that case had applied standards of their own choosing in deciding how to pre-canvass ballots, and what should be done about ballots which were discovered during the pre-canvass to be defective and would therefore be rejected.

Biden’s margin of victory has now grown to 80,000 votes in Pennsylvania, and it is uncertain if the number of ballots that can be called into question in the litigation underway will ultimately involve enough ballots to potentially reverse the final vote count. But at this point, it is still not yet known how many ballots might have been rejected in those seven counties had all the requirements for casting a valid mail-in ballot had been strictly enforced. Most significantly, there has still not been a public statement issued by any of the seven counties as to how many ballots arrived lacking the required inner “security sleeve”, and if all such ballots were rejected.