Voting booth
CNN  — 

At least 74,000 absentee ballot requests submitted by voters in three Iowa counties will remain invalid because of technical problems with the paperwork, the Iowa Supreme Court ruled Wednesday.

The court upheld earlier rulings that the forms were invalid because the counties pre-emptively filled out some of the voters’ information, like their name and date of birth. Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate, a Republican, had issued a directive telling counties that they cannot send pre-filled applications.

Republicans filed lawsuits over the summer to invalidate the ballot requests. They prevailed in the lower courts, and the Democrats unsuccessfully appealed to the GOP-dominated Iowa Supreme Court.

The three counties – Linn, Johnson and Woodbury – are making efforts to notify those voters who are affected. They already sent out a new round of absentee ballot request forms to all voters, after lower courts sided with the Republican Party and Trump campaign and invalidated the original forms.

Last week, Linn County auditor Joel Miller told CNN that he was still trying to reach about 14,000 voters who sent in the original forms but still haven’t returned the corrected version of the forms. Johnson County auditor Travis Weipert said there were about 2,000 voters they were still trying to track down.