An election worker feeds ballots into a machine during a recount of mail-in ballots at the Clark County Election Department, Thursday, June 30, 2022, in North Las Vegas, Nev. (AP Photo/John Locher)

John Locher

A Pennsylvania judge has ordered three Republican-controlled counties to add about 800 contested mail-in ballots to the results of the May election, ruling in a legal dispute that stalled statewide certification of the primary results for governor and U.S. Senate.

The Republican judge sided Friday with the Democratic governor in a lawsuit related to how the trio of counties had not counted the mail-in ballots without handwritten dates on their return envelopes — something that Butler County had also avoided.

The law requires voters to date the envelopes. But Commonwealth Court President Judge Renee Cohn Jubelirer agreed with Gov. Tom Wolf’s administration that the lack of a date was a minor irregularity and should not result in those voters’ disenfranchisement.

Berks, Fayette and Lancaster counties were ordered to count the undated mail-in ballots, and the judge gave the counties a Wednesday deadline to certify their primary election results — including the undated ballots — and report back to state election officials.

The ruling came more than a month after the Wolf administration filed suit against the counties’ election boards to force them to count the undated ballots and certify their results.

Butler County too did not count its undated ballots, but it is excluded from this decision.

After filing suit against the three counties, state officials learned that a fourth county, Butler, failed to include undated mail-in ballots in the election results it certified to the state.

The Wolf administration chose not to add Butler County to its lawsuit because the state's top elections official had already certified the county's results and “balanced the need to have accurate results with the need to have finality in these already-certified elections,” the judge wrote.