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An election-shaking decision from the Pennsylvania Supreme Court appears to have averted a brewing constitutional crisis. The state’s high court has found that mail-in ballots that violate the law regarding improper dating should be separated off and not counted on election night.

In October, I wrote a piece detailing the attempted flaunting of the law by Democrats, nothing the arbitrary and lawless nature of counting invalid ballots.

As RedState previously reported, the Supreme Court vacated a state court decision requiring Pennsylvania to count un-dated mail-in ballots. The plain letter of the law requires that a mail-in ballot must be filled, signed, and dated in order to be counted. Despite that, Democrat state officials have pledged to defy the law, giving guidance to counties that they not only should un-dated ballots be counted, but they aren’t even required to be sequestered pending further legal action.

Their reasoning? That voters shouldn’t be disenfranchised based on a “technical violation.”

Who gets to decide what “technical violations” can be ignored? That would seem to be a dangerous road to go down in regards to simply shunning the law based on an arbitrary judgment by a partisan state official. Pennsylvania’s mail-in voting law isn’t ambiguous. It pointedly says that ballots must be dated to be counted.

Now, because of the new ruling from the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, the ballots will not be counted on election night. Instead, they have been ordered to be sequestered pending further legal action.

The United States Supreme Court had already vacated a prior decision in Pennsylvania ordering the counting of the invalid ballots. Many may remember how contentious of a subject that was during the 2020 election.

In response to the US Supreme Court’s ruling, Democrats decided to essentially ignore it, citing a non-binding ruling from a lower court judge. Worse, state officials (all of them Democrats) weren’t even requiring the separating off of the questionable ballots in case a future court decision ruled them inadmissible in the election. In short, Democrats were trying to shove through a bunch of invalid ballots in hopes of running out the clock, leaving no way to fix the situation in the future.

It was reminiscent of some of the Biden administration’s maneuvers where the president has chosen to break the law with the plan to get what he wants before the courts can step in. The now-struck-down eviction moratorium is a good example of that. With the Pennsylvania Supreme Court stepping in over the mail-in ballots just a week before the mid-terms, though, perhaps the courts are getting wise to the left’s game.

And while there’s a chance these invalid ballots could be counted at a later date, there’s reason to believe that won’t happen. Even considering that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court is split evenly on the case so far, are they really willing to possibly change the result of an election weeks or even months after it has concluded?

Color me extremely skeptical that they’ll be willing to ignore the law to that extent. Yes, courts aren’t supposed to be influenced by outside reactions, but I would think there are limits to how far they themselves want to go. Imagine a world in which Republican Mehmet Oz wins on election night and then Democrat John Fetterman is declared the winner three months later, flipping control of the US Senate back to the Democratic Party. I don’t even want to think about that.

Regardless, this entire thing never should have gotten this far. You literally have Democrats saying they are going to simply ignore duly-passed election laws because they see a partisan benefit in it. While this decision is necessary, far more needs to happen to discourage and punish that kind of behavior in the future. If Americans can’t trust that their election laws will be followed, then there’s no country left to save.

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