Supreme Court orders separating late-arriving Pennsylvania ballots

NEW YORK: The federal Supreme Court has ordered Pennsylvania to keep the postal ballots that arrived after election day separately but did not agree to the Republican Party request to stop the vote-counting in the state where Democratic Party candidate Joe Biden has overtaken President Donald Trump.

Justice Samuel Alito issued the order Friday evening on a request for an emergency order filed by the Republican Party. It gives room for the court to decide on a pending case over the legality of a state-level court order extending the deadline for accepting postal ballots to Friday.

The Supreme Court was split evenly, four votes for each side, on the case filed last month by the Republican Party to invalidate the state court ruling and throw out the votes that arrived after election day. When the court takes up the case again, the newly-appointed justice, Amy Coney Barrett, could tilt the balance.

If Biden wins Pennsylvania, where he was leading on Friday by over 13,000 votes, he will have more than the 270 electoral votes to win the presidency. Rather than the popular votes, the votes in the electoral college of state representatives determine who will be president.

The Republican Party acknowledged in its Supreme Court filing that "the vote in Pennsylvania may well determine the next President of the United States". In a separate case in a state court has ordered election officials on Friday to stop counting some provisional votes cast on election day.

The order applies to the so-called provisional ballots, which some voters were allowed to cast to correct errors in postal ballots that they had already sent in. Ruling on cases filed by Republican Party members, the court said that such ballots should be kept separately pending a decision, but rejected demands that they should be rejected outright. (IANS)

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