Emil Bove Starts Judicial Career With a Sneer

One year ago, Emil Bove was a simple defense lawyer for then-presidential candidate Donald Trump. He had represented him throughout the Manhattan criminal hush money trial that led to his client’s conviction, and worked on the two federal cases against the then-former president.

After Trump won, Bove became the president’s personal enforcer in the DOJ. He spearheaded the bizarre attempt to turn Eric Adams’ corruption case into a means to secure his loyalty to the president’s immigration policy, and purportedly pushed for defiance of the courts during the Alien Enemies Act removals to El Salvador’s CECOT prison.

Now, all that triangulating, norm-shattering, and playing innocent when confronted with it has paid off. Bove is serving in the rarified role of a federal judge on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals.

On Friday, he went out of his way in that role to issue a 20-page order in an elections case that the court decided nearly two weeks ago. On Oct. 14, the Third Circuit denied a full-court rehearing that the RNC had requested over an August ruling. In that case, the panel upheld a lower court decision requiring Pennsylvania to count undated or incorrectly dated mail-in ballots, ruling that earlier directives to toss ballots that contained those errors violated the Constitution. These ballots are often hotly contested in Pennsylvania elections, with Republicans seeking to limit the criteria for which mail-in votes are accepted and Democrats trying to expand it.

The appeals court said when it issued its opinion that Bove would file his own dissent at a later date. On Friday, it came. It offers a look at the start of Bove’s newfound career as an appellate judge.

He argued in the dissent, which clocks in at 20 pages, that the dating requirements in question were so small as to be a burden that is “non-existent.”

“At issue here is Pennsylvania’s requirement that voters write the date next to their signature on a declaration while transmitting a mail-in ballot,” the opinion reads. “For a voter with a functioning pen, sufficient ink, and average hand dexterity, this should take less than five seconds.”

The case began as a challenge, filed in 2022 by Pennsylvania Democrats, to Pennsylvania state instructions issued to county boards of elections. The instructions mandated that the boards ignore mail-in ballots that had been cast on time but were missing a date or contained the wrong date on the exterior envelopes.

A lower court judge didn’t rule until March 2025, finding that the requirements were unconstitutional.

Bove dismissed the court’s role in the matter, saying that the lower court had added to “existing uncertainty already faced by Pennsylvania officials preparing to administer
elections on November 4, 2025, as well as during the midterm congressional elections next
year.” The Supreme Court would hopefully take the case and reverse the decision, he added.

To do otherwise, he wrote, would be to allow an opinion to stand that “can result in an anti-democratic seizure of power from the People’s politically accountable representatives.”