The coverage of the PA SCOTUS decision today makes it rather obvious that a lot of reporters have no idea how to cover court cases or what is the court's role. They always seem to imply the court ruled to promote a certain policy outcome, which is rarely what happened.

In today's case, SCOTUS rejected stay requestS from the PA GOP after the state Supreme Court ruled ballots can be received up to 3 days after the election as long as it wasn't postmarked after the election. They didn't provide an opinion/explanation.

The 4 Justices who wanted to grant the stay likely wanted to do so because the PA statute is rather clear in limiting ballots to being received by 8 PM on election day and such a change needs to come from the PA legislature, not the courts. They'd argue it's not the court's role.

The Justices who denied the stay might be good with the state court's ruling because they think this year's circumstances present a conflict between the statute and voting rights. They might also simply view it as a state issue so not appropriate for SCOTUS to take up (Roberts).

In either case, these are legal arguments that include considerations of who should be dealing with the topic (state courts, legislature, federal courts etc). It's just not as simple as conservative justices didn't want to extend voting & liberals wanted to count more voters.

BTW one thing to add is another real concern based on the PA Supreme Court's ruling is that it seems like ballots without a postmark that are received before Nov 6th might be counted as on-time unless there is specific evidence they are from after election day.