Hi, I’m George Gerbo, and welcome to Washington Times Weekly, where we get to sit down with our reporters and talk about their coverage of the latest news and events.
Joining me this time is Washington Times legal affairs reporter, Alex Swoyer.
[GERBO] A whole bunch is going on in and around the Supreme Court. We’ll start with a recent decision to reject a challenge by the Republican National Committee to Pennsylvania and how they allow voters to file provisional ballots on Election Day, even if those voters have already sent in mail-in ballots. What’s the rationale behind that case?
[SWOYER] We don’t really know why the court didn’t want to hear it. The RNC had challenged Pennsylvania. A lower court, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, actually held that voters who had some sort of issue with their mail-in ballot — whether it was lacking a signature, a date, something like that — could go to their polling place and cast a provisional ballot. And that was said to be lawful. The RNC was saying, no, that’s not what the state law says, trying to keep those provisional ballots from being cast in addition to the mail-in. So the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that the provisional ballots are okay, and the RNC took it to the Supreme Court, but they decided not to take it.
[GERBO] Moving on to a case in Florida, it involves something the court has taken up in the past in terms of prayer and specifically praying in and around high school football games. We’ve had a ruling a few years ago on the court in terms of prayer at the 50-yard line of a football game. In this case from Florida, a Christian school wanted to pray over its public address system before a game with another Christian school. And they’re now coming to the court to have them grant that hopefully in their favor.
[SWOYER] It was a Christian school, I guess the championships, the playoffs with another Christian school, they had planned to pray over the loudspeaker ahead of the pregame. It was a routine that they did. From the filing, it actually says they were able to do so years prior. So it was odd to them that the state athletic organization didn’t permit it that time. So they have taken this all the way to the Supreme Court.
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