Some see the one-day delay in counting mail-in ballots from Tuesday’s primary as just one more misfire by Luzerne County’s mistake-prone election system.
But Luzerne County is not alone. Counties around the state, large and small, were unable to complete their mail-in counts Tuesday night. Some had still not finished as of Thursday afternoon.
In Luzerne County, the Bureau of Elections suspended the mail-in count around 6 p.m. Tuesday to avoid paying unbudgeted overtime to 15 workers from other county departments enlisted to help with the crush of mail-in votes. Federal pandemic relief funds used in previous elections to pay 35 workers from other departments were not available this year.
County officials say a communications breakdown was to blame for the delayed count, but the larger issue is the state government’s failure to give counties more flexibility to manage the extra work involved in handling an explosion in mail-in voting.
Before the state General Assembly allowed no-excuse mail-in ballots in 2020, mid-term primaries of the type held this week generated little more than 2,000 traditional absentee ballots in Luzerne County. This week, the county Election Bureau counted 18,340 mail-in ballots. Since the change in 2020, 38% of votes cast in Luzerne Countyhave been delivered through the mail or drop boxes.
State limits on when those votes can be processed and counted virtually guarantee backlogs. Mail-in ballots arrive in two sealed envelopes, an outer one containing the voter’s signature and an inner secrecy envelope. After a voter’s signature is verified, each ballot must be removed from those envelopes and placed in a tabulation machine for counting. But under state law, the whole process cannot begin until 7 a.m. on Election Day.
In 37 other states, election laws permit pre-canvassing, that is, opening the envelopes and staging the ballots for counting before Election Day. Some states allow pre-canvassing upon receipt of a ballot. Others allow the practice to begin a week or a month before Election Day. Some states begin counting mail-in votes well before Election Day, but withhold results until the polls close.
Pennsylvania’s ban on pre-canvassing not only ensures inefficiency and added expense, it offers opportunities for charlatans to cast doubt on election results, as the former president has done in his own 2020 loss and in the current GOP primary race for U.S. Senate, falsely claiming there is something fraudulent in counting properly cast votes after Election Day.
While Republicans push to limit mail-in voting over unfounded and unproven “election security” concerns, average voters in Pennsylvania have embraced the practice. In November 2020, 2.6 million Pennsylvanians, 39% of voters, chose mail-in ballots. More than 900,000 voters applied for mail-in or absentee ballots for Tuesday’s party primaries.
Pennsylvanians have demonstrated they want to continue voting by mail. Now Harrisburg has to give counties the tools to process and count those votes in a more efficient manner by allowing pre-canvassing and early counting.
— The Citizens’ Voice, Wilkes-Barre via TNS
