Republicans on Monday asked the U.S. Supreme Court for an emergency order in Pennsylvania that could result in thousands of votes not being counted in this year’s election in the battleground state.

Just over a week before the election, the court is being asked to step into a dispute over provisional ballots cast by Pennsylvania voters whose mail ballots are rejected for not following technical procedures in state law.

The state’s high court ruled 4-3 that elections officials must count provisional ballots cast by voters whose mail-in ballots were voided because they arrived without mandatory secrecy envelopes.

The election fight arrived at the Supreme Court the same day Virginia sought the justices’ intervention in a dispute over purging voter registrations.

Four years ago, the high court weighed in on pandemic-inspired changes in voting rules in several states, including Pennsylvania.

In their high-court filing, state and national Republicans asked for an order putting the state court ruling on hold or, barring that, requiring the provisional ballots be segregated and not included in the official vote count while the legal fight plays out.

They argued that the legislature did not provide for giving voters a do-over if they make mistakes on ballots they put in the mail.

Secrecy envelopes keep ballots concealed as elections workers open the stamped outer envelopes used to mail the whole packets back. Voters also must sign and date the exterior envelopes. Pennsylvania voters have so far applied for 2 million mail ballots.

Two voters in western Pennsylvania’s Butler County sued after the local board of elections rejected the provisional votes they cast once they were informed of problems with the ballots they had mailed.

A county judge had upheld the election officials’ decisions.

Mail-in ballot rules in Pennsylvania changed drastically under a 2019 law, widely expanding their use and producing a series of lawsuits.

Most counties — but not all — help inform voters in advance of Election Day that their mail-in ballot will be rejected, giving them the opportunity to cast a provisional ballot at their polling place, according to the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania.

Virginia case

Also Monday, the state of Virginia asked the Supreme Court to intervene to allow the state to remove roughly 1,600 voters from its rolls that it believes are noncitizens.

The request comes after a federal appeals court on Sunday unanimously upheld a federal judge’s order restoring the registrations of those 1,600 voters, whom the judge said were illegally purged under an executive order by the state’s Republican governor.

Gov. Glenn Youngkin says he ordered the daily removals in an effort to keep noncitizens from voting. But U.S. District Judge Patricia Giles ruled late last week that Youngkin’s program was illegal under federal law because it systematically purged voters during a 90-day “quiet period” ahead of the November election.

The Justice Department and a coalition of private groups sued to block Youngkin’s removal program earlier this month. They argued that the quiet period is in place to ensure that legitimate voters aren’t removed from the rolls by bureaucratic errors or last-minute mistakes that can’t be rectified in a timely manner.

Youngkin said he was simply upholding a state law that requires Virginia to cancel noncitizens’ registration.

The ruling Sunday from the three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., sided with the judge who ordered the restoration of voters’ registrations.

The appeals court said Virginia is wrong to assert that it is being forced to restore 1,600 noncitizens to the voter rolls. The judges found that Virginia’s process for removing voters established no proof that those purged were actually noncitizens.

Youngkin’s executive order, issued in August, required daily checks of data from the Department of Motor Vehicles against voter rolls to identify noncitizens.

State officials said any voter identified as a noncitizen was notified and given two weeks to dispute their disqualification before being removed. If they returned a form attesting to their citizenship, their registration would not be canceled.

The appeal filed to the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday by Virginia’s Republican attorney general, Jason Miyares, asks the high court to intervene by Tuesday. Without any intervention, the injunction issued last week by Giles requires Virginia to notify affect voters and local registrars by Wednesday of the restorations she ordered.

Miyares’ filing argues that requiring Virginia to restore the voter registrations of those who have been identified as noncitizens is a “violation of Virginia law and common sense.”