How Pennsylvania’s mail-in voting rules will lead to thousands of early voting on Election Day

On By Littum

Last week, a flurry of court cases in Pennsylvania clarified the rules for mail voting there. In short, mail-in ballots will still be rejected in the key battleground state if voters don’t properly date the affidavits that accompany their ballots — but voters who make a mistake with their mail-in ballots will instead be able to vote by provisional ballot on Election Day.

The NBC News Decision Desk looked into how many mail ballots are still outstanding in the state, as well as how many counties have already identified as deficient. In the event of a close race in Pennsylvania, provisional ballots and their counting will get a lot of attention after Tuesday night.

Voters with outstanding postal ballots must ensure that election officials receive them no later than 20 Tuesday, so that they can count. But voters with outstanding or incomplete postal ballots can also go to their polling stations to vote in person.

The data makes it clear that most provisional ballots are likely to come from voters with outstanding mail ballots, rather than voters who have already returned incomplete mail ballots. And they also make it clear that these provisional ballots may favor Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party.

Data on postal ballots and potential provisional ballots

Overall, about 2.2 million Pennsylvanians have had mail-in ballot applications approved, according to the public data from the Secretary of State. So far, about 82% have returned their postal ballots, according to the latest figures on Monday. This means that around 390,000 postal ballots are outstanding.

If Pennsylvania’s 2024 election follows the same trend we observed in 2022this means around 150,000 more postal ballots will arrive in time to be counted, either via post or drop boxes. The remaining people with outstanding postal ballots must vote in person on Election Day to have their votes counted. If those voters show up and turn in their mail ballots, they could vote with regular ballots; if they don’t, they will vote with provisional ballots, which election officials will only count after confirming that the original mail-in ballots were not counted.

In 2022, about one-third of voters who requested but did not return their mail-in ballots voted in person. Taking 2022 as a guide, we would expect about 90,000 to vote in person, with about 35,000 using provisional ballots.

Given that the outstanding mail ballots are disproportionately held by registered Democrats, we expect these early votes to give Democratic candidates some extra votes that won’t be reflected in the vote totals until a few days after Election Day.

It’s harder to estimate how many mail-in ballots will be rejected when election officials begin searching for them Tuesday. Not only does Pennsylvania reject mail ballots if voters did not sign or properly date the statements on the outside of the return envelopes or enclose the ballots in inner envelopes, but it also prohibits counties from “searching,” or opening, mailing ballots before Election Day.

Some counties identify mail ballots with incomplete declarations or missing silence envelopes before Election Day without opening them, but some leave the task until Election Day. As a result, in some counties we cannot tell the true status of mail ballots.

Overall, our panel of available statewide data per day shows 5,524 incomplete mail-in ballots per day. Monday – 2,258 are missing signatures, 2,471 are missing dates or are incorrectly dated, and 795 are missing confidentiality obligations. The data also shows that about 4,400 voters have taken advantage of county-specific policies to “cure” or correct their problematic mail-in ballots.

In counties where we expect election officials to have checked mail ballots returned to date for any misstatements or secrecy issues, about 0.8% of mail ballots have ever been recorded as defective. If that’s true, we’d expect slightly fewer than 20,000 incomplete mail-in ballots statewide — but the percentage of deficiencies could be higher in other counties.

Voters who have returned defective postal ballots and have not yet corrected them can vote on Election Day, typically by provisional ballot. Those provisional ballots will be counted, according to the state Supreme Court’s decision last week.

But at least in 2022, relatively few voters took advantage of that option. Meanwhile, as noted above, an estimated 35,000 are casting provisional ballots after not returning their postal ballots at all.

Going forward, we expect that there will be some discussion on election night and in the days following about provisional ballots cast by people who had requested postal ballots. There may well be future lawsuits that will once again decide whether to count provisional ballots cast by people who previously returned defective mail ballots. But given the margin of victory in Pennsylvania, it’s important to keep in mind that many more provisional ballots will be cast by people who never return their mail-in ballots at all.