The tape of Dr. Luketich's conversation about suboxone is still in litigation over whether it was illegal or not and whether there could be an "expectation of privacy" in the room where the talk happened, but it was ultimately irrelevant to the question of whether he violated the law/regulations by billing the government for surgeries when he was shuttling among them. He even tried to use the tape to keep the whistleblower from getting a share of the settlement, but was denied by a judge who said it had nothing to do with the case that settled.

The issue becomes whether the government can make up and enforce certain parts of laws to unnecessarily raise the bar for voting, or just catch enough people making dumb mistakes to cut into their margins or discourage them from voting in the future.

Yes, the law says you "shall" sign and date your ballot. But did you know that the law also says that if you vote in person, you "shall" shut a privacy curtain or door behind you, and "shall" fold your ballot before handing it over to the poll workers to be stuck in the box to be counted? Have you ever voted at a polling place with cardboard screens instead of curtains, or stuck your ballot into a blank folder, or just turned it over without folding it? Should everyone who didn't shut a curtain or door, or fold their ballot have their vote disqualified, or does the privacy-preserving purpose of that rule have other methods of fulfillment that don't justify tossing all those votes? The language is the same as the date provision, but you have to look at the purpose of it and whether enforcement of that language is material to that purpose, if it has one.

That's the "materiality" argument that this case is making (it had been made before and was accepted by a federal appeals court, but got tossed out by SCOTUS on a technicality; the state's Supreme Court was short a judge and tied 3-3 on whether throwing out all these undated/wrongly-dated ballots violated federal civil rights) -- and the argument will be very important if any election in the state is close enough for these ballots to matter.

That should be in past tense. Even though counties had previously counted “wrong” dates, the Republicans’ lawsuit the PA Supreme Court ruled on had sought to stop the counting of ballots with either missing or “incorrect” dates, so now those are all supposed to be set aside, not just the undated ones.

From the very Law360 article you’re citing:

> Ari Savitzky of the American Civil Liberties Union, who represents Lehigh County voters, told Law360 that the high court's vacating of the Third Circuit's ruling was done on "purely procedural grounds."

"As for November, it remains clear that, under state law and federal law, timely mail ballots where a voter merely forgets to handwrite an inconsequential date on the outer envelope must be counted," Savitzky said in an email. "Nothing about today's procedural decision changes that."

The RNC has since asked the state Supreme Court to weigh in on the issue, since the US Supreme Court and the lower state court rulings still left room for doubt in their minds.

The US Supreme Court ruling was not as cut-and-dry as some partisan sources are making it out to be, and the state believes it has its orders from the lower court.

The "court order" I think you're referring to undid the Third Circuit's ruling that said to count mail-in ballots that were only lacking a handwritten date. The U.S. Supreme Court didn't say the Third Circuit was wrong, but that the appeal had been moot because the candidate challenging the practice had conceded their election and had nothing left to be fighting for. So the federal appeals court ruling that said those ballots should count was tossed out on a technicality, returning things to the status that had existed beforehand (which is to say, people were disagreeing over whether missing dates were reason to throw out ballots).

But there had been another state court ruling that independently said to count undated ballots, so state elections officials said to keep following that order until told otherwise -- which the state Supreme Court is considering now.

The Third Circuit had ruled on a different principle that says if you make a minor mistake that’s not material to the reason for the rules, that’s not worth losing your vote over. The state courts had generally agreed. Since the purpose of the part that was being signed and dated is to say “I attest that I am who I say I am and I am qualified to vote,” the date part was not “material” because the important date was the date the ballot was received, not the date it was signed.

People were making other mistakes with the date, like putting their birthday or the date of the election there, and election boards were counting them; it was only the undated ballots that were being tossed out.

The Supreme Court did not say anything about why it was reversing the Third Circuit ruling that the ballots should be counted, except to send the case back with orders that it be declared moot. So another case could potentially hinge on the same arguments about the materiality of the date (and there were some cases in state court moving to do so in the Oz/McCormick primary until McCormick conceded).