WASHINGTON — On Monday, Republican officials filed an emergency request with the U.S. Supreme Court concerning voting procedures in Pennsylvania, a pivotal state in the upcoming election. The request could potentially lead to thousands of votes being excluded from the final tally.

With the election just over a week away, the focus of the Supreme Court case centers around provisional ballots that were submitted by voters whose mail-in ballots faced rejection due to minor violations of state regulations. In a recent ruling, Pennsylvania’s highest court determined that election officials are required to accept provisional ballots from voters whose mail-in votes were dismissed because they were not submitted in the required secrecy envelopes.

This electoral dispute has reached the Supreme Court concurrently with a separate appeal from Virginia, where state officials are asking for judicial review on the issue of removing voters from registration lists. This situation mirrors previous interventions by the Supreme Court during the 2020 election cycle, when the justices addressed various pandemic-related changes to voting procedures across multiple states, Pennsylvania included.

In their appeal to the Supreme Court, Republicans at both state and national levels have requested that the ruling from Pennsylvania’s state court be paused. In the event that the court does not grant a complete hold on the ruling, they are asking for provisional ballots to be kept separate and excluded from the initial vote counts while the legal matters are resolved.