Supreme Court rejects Republican bid to bar some provisional ballots in Pennsylvania
The Supreme Court has rejected a Republican appeal and left in place a Pennsylvania court decision allowing people to cast provisional ballots when their mail-in votes are rejected for not following technical procedures in state law.
The court released the decision on Friday, after an "apparent software malfunction" sent out early notifications about orders that were slated to be released on Monday. A technological error also resulted in an opinion being posted early last year.
The justices acted in an appeal filed by the Republican National Committee, the state GOP and the Republican-majority election board in Butler County.
Pennsylvania's top court ruled last year that the county must count provisional ballots that were cast by two voters after they learned their mail-in ballots were voided because they arrived without mandatory secrecy envelopes.
Pennsylvania Democrats had urged the court to stay out of the case.
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Yahoo
42 minutes ago
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Before the disaster, many survivors were living in large multigenerational homes that were destroyed. Since then, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement had the highest demand for one-and two-bedroom units as individual, smaller family units that used to live in multigenerational homes searched for housing for themselves, Jachowski said. 'The data clearly shows we have a lot of households that are smaller and could benefit from smaller homes, ' he said. IN 2024, Gov. Josh Green signed Senate Bill 2919 into law clarifying that each county has the authority to determine what to do with transient vacation rentals as the state faced an ongoing shortage of 50, 000 homes. Bissen was the first to respond with Bill 9. Bissen and Green have repeatedly said Maui and the state cannot build their way out of the lack of housing. To them, converting vacation rentals into long-term housing represents the most logical path forward. State Rep. Luke Evslin (D, Wailua-Lihue ), who chairs the House Committee on Housing, has been working on ideas ahead of the next legislative session to create more housing but said the counties now control the future of their own short-term vacation rentals. 'We've done all we can do on the short-term vacation issue, ' Evslin said. 'At this point, it's up to them.' Several members of the Honolulu City Council's Housing, Homelessness and Parks Committee did not respond to Star-Advertiser requests for comment on what they might do about converting Oahu's short-term vacation rentals. Matt Weyer, who serves on the housing committee, said he's more interested in cracking down on the estimated 118 to 120 illegal short-term rental units in his district, especially in residential and rural areas around Turtle Bay Resort. Weyer's Council district stretches across the North Shore down to the upper Windward side and as far south as Mililani. In the North Shore alone, Weyer said, there are about 262 legal short-term rentals, and he has not heard an outcry from residents to convert them into long-term housing. 'I wouldn't say phasing them out would solve the problems we're facing, ' he said. 'We're looking at how we can best target illegal vacation rentals … by enforcing the existing laws. That's the struggle. We want to ensure that folks that are doing it illegally are doing it legally. That really creates the biggest impact.' U.S. Rep. Jill Tokuda, whose district includes rural Oahu and the neighbor islands, said that converting Maui's 6, 100 short-term vacation rentals into long-term housing might help the island's housing shortage and stem the exodus of local residents to the mainland. 'We've got to do something, ' Tokuda said. 'It's going to require some bold, pretty bold action to keep people here and to free up available units for local families. If not, they're going to keep leaving.'
