In a single-judge ruling Thursday, the Commonwealth Court tossed out a lawsuit led by the RNC & PA GOP seeking to block any counties from implementing “notice & cure” procedures — where election workers who see that a returned mail-in ballot is missing something crucial to being counted, like a signature, date, or secrecy envelope, can contact the voter to have them come in to fix the deficiency or cast a provisional ballot to replace the uncountable one.

Judge Ellen Ceisler ruled that her court lacked jurisdiction over the dispute, since the Commonwealth Court hears cases and appeals involving state government, and state election officials were only giving guidance to county boards of elections, which are themselves local and not branches of the state. So if the Republicans (or anyone else) wanted to challenge the counties that did notice & cure, they’d have to file lawsuits in those counties’ courts.

It’s kind of a technicality that the case was dismissed on, but Judge Ceisler had earlier refused an injunction the Republicans sought before the 2022 election over the same issue, reasoning that some voters had fixed their busted ballots in years past and shouldn’t be blindsided now. The state Supreme Court, short by a Justice after last year’s death of Max Baer, then deadlocked 3-3 over the injunction, which lets the lower court ruling stand.

The practice could still be challenged on a county-by-county basis, or Republicans could appeal again to the Supreme Court of PA and hope for a different break. But some of the Trump lawsuits after 2020 had tried to make the same arguments about unfairness to voters whose counties didn’t allow “curing” and the courts said to sue those counties, not throw out the cured ballots in other counties. And those courts didn’t really take up arguments over whether looking at a returned ballot envelope to see that it was missing a date or signature counted as “pre-canvassing,” which isn’t allowed in PA until the morning of the election.