The anticipated wave of technical challenges in the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania began late Tuesday with twin state and federal suits aiming to have thousands of votes disqualified across dozens of counties.Brought by lawyers associated with the state GOP on behalf of Republican candidates—including Rep. Mike Kelly (R-PA)—and activists, the suits challenge efforts to “cure” ballots which voters improperly filled out or failed to put in mandatory secrecy envelopes.One, which will come before a federal judge in Philadelphia on Wednesday morning, deals with a relatively small number of ballots in adjoining Montgomery County, a large and Democratic-leaning suburb. Citing internal communications from and among county officials, the complaint asserts that officials violated state law that only allowed the processing of mail-in ballots to begin at 7 a.m. on Election Day by ascertaining which ballots were “naked”—lacking the secrecy envelope—and thus could not be legally counted. The suit contends these officials further violated state law and Pennsylvania Supreme Court precedent by contacting voters and giving them a chance to fix their ballots.Election 2020: Live ResultsThis suit drew the attention of the Democratic National Committee, which filed to intervene in the matter early Wednesday morning, potentially escalating the stakes. The party organization asserted that its efforts to promote remote voting, and its support for candidates potentially impacted by the suit, gave it standing in the matter.“The DNC has dedicated significant institutional resources to encourage its supporters and constituents to vote by mail, resources that could have been directed to other states or to encouraging in-person voting in Pennsylvania had the DNC been aware of the potential for lawfully cast ballots to be declared spoiled, as Plaintiffs request,” reads the brief attorneys with the firm Perkins Coie filed. “Montgomery County’s ballot intake procedure complies with both the Pennsylvania Election Code and the practices of county election boards across the Commonwealth.”But “the bigger case”—as state GOP counsel Thomas King put it to The Daily Beast—requests that the state court slap down guidance Secretary of the Commonwealth Kathy Boockvar gave counties across Pennsylvania. Boockvar’s office had directed counties to allow voters whose absentee votes they had rejected for technical reasons to cast provisional ballots.The Republican suit, to which Kelly is a party, argues this violates the same state law."It's absolutely illegal in Pennsylvania to divulge that information,” King argued in an interview with The Daily Beast. "There is no opportunity for a second vote under the law in Pennsylvania.”Boockvar, a Democrat, defended her guidance in a press conference Tuesday night.“We don’t think we broke the law,” public radio station WHYY quoted her saying. “There’s absolutely nothing in Pennsylvania law that prohibits that practice.”Montgomery County officials similarly defended their policy, even as they indicated they would separate out the votes in question.Biden in Election Night Address: ‘We Feel Good About Where We Are’“We believe our process is sound and permissible under the election code,” said Kelly Cofrancisco, a county spokeswoman, told the Bucks County Courier-Times.Because not all counties followed the same policy on vote-counting, the GOP suit explicitly compared the inconsistency to the differing procedures in Florida that led the U.S. Supreme Court siding with then-candidate George W. Bush in 2000, effectively awarding him the presidency.“It’s clearly ripe for a challenge,” Professor Daniel Mallinson, a politics and elections expert at Pennsylvania State University at Harrisburg, told The Daily Beast.Mallinson is one of a number of Keystone State observers who previously predicted that the millions of mail-in ballots sent and returned to its major metropolitan areas could take days to tabulate, creating increasing risks of political friction.The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled in September that “naked ballots” without the secrecy envelope could not count toward the state’s totals. A disproportionate number of Democrats have sought to vote absentee, and the question of “curing” ballots could shift the margin if the outcome in the state is extremely tight.Read more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.