Have you ever written out a check several days before you actually mailed it? Or backdated a check to make it look like you sent it on time? Maybe you were simply wrong about what day it was, and the date on the check was wrong for that reason.

The truth is, the date on a check is not reliable information. Obviously, the same is true for an absentee ballot. For this reason, election officials can’t rely on your say-so about when you filled out and (certainly not) when you actually mailed your ballot.

Fortunately, election officials have two much more important pieces of information to guide them. In many cases, they have the post office stamp that shows when the ballot was processed by the USPS, and they have their own timestamp which is placed on the ballot on the same day they receive it.

In Pennsylvania, where the U.S. Senate Republican primary race between Mehmet Oz and David McCormick is headed for a recount, there is a state law that says all mail-in ballots must be signed and dated by the voter. The signature is a reasonable requirement but the date is not. Thousands of voters forget to add the date and they can have their vote invalidated as a result.

This was just litigated in the federal Third Circuit Court of Appeals, in as case involving a county judgeship election from November 2021. A three-judge panel ruled that the voter-supplied date on the mail-in ballot is immaterial to whether the ballot was received on time, and the absence of a date should not spoil the ballot.

This means that similar ballots in the U.S. Senate recount will not be tossed.

That’s possibly bad news for Trump-endorsed Oz, because his voters were less inclined to vote by mail than McCormick’s. When the recount begins, lawyers for Oz will be looking to invalidate as many mail-in ballots as they can, and there are a lot of undated ballots.

Nick Custodio, a deputy Philadelphia city commissioner, said there were 2,100 mail and absentee ballots that had been received without dates in Philadelphia as of Friday afternoon. Of those, about 100 were Republican ballots.

He said that number would go up slightly, however, because officials had not yet completed processing mail ballots.

If McCormick has something like 70-30 advantage with mail-in voters, an additional 100 ballots from Philadelphia County would net him 40 votes. Repeat that all over the state, and it could quickly add up to hundreds of votes. As of today, Oz has an advantage of slightly over 1,000 votes, but the ruling will reduce that number. It could possibly erase it.

This is going to make Trump and his supporters go absolutely mental. It will reinforce their narrative about the 2020 election when Biden was initially behind when the same-day votes were tallied but steadily erased his deficit and moved into the lead when absentee ballots were counted. It will give them a reason to argue that the rules were changed and state law ignored in an effort to steal the election away from Oz.

But, on the merits, there’s simply no reason to demand that voters date their ballots because they can put any date they want on the ballot and there’s no way to tell if they lied or made a mistake. If an election office received the ballot on time, that’s proof that it was submitted before Election Day.

The court’s ruling is fair and sensible, but it will be amusing to watch how it is treated by the conspiracy-minded lunatics on the right.