Erie County wasn't alone. The tallying in other Pennsylvania counties and in another battleground state, Michigan, also dragged on for days, prompting some to suggest that Election Day could become Election Week when voters pick a president in November.
The delay is the direct result of a new form of voting in the Keystone state — no-excuse mail-in voting — and a new electronic voting machine system that both produces and scans paper ballots.
Mail-in ballots accounted for nearly half of all votes cast in the primary in Erie County.
Erie County Clerk Doug Smith said the work for the Erie County Office of Elections and Voting staff has been 95 percent by hand and only 5 percent by machine.
Here's why:
Open and sort
All mail-in ballots have to be opened — they have both an outer envelope and security envelope — and then sorted by precinct. Erie County has 149 precincts."The preponderance of our time has been spent organizing and separating ballots from their envelopes," Smith said last week.
Pandemic
There was an influx of mail-in ballots due to COVID-19. The postponement of the primary from April 28 to June 2 gave state and local officials more time to promote the option, which was part of the bipartisan Act 77, passed in 2019.Extension
Gov. Tom Wolf gave voters in six counties, including Erie, more time to return their ballots. Instead of requiring that mail-in ballots be returned to the county election office by the close of polls, Wolf's order allowed for ballots to be postmarked no later than June 2. They would be counted as long as they were returned to the county by June 9. Roughly 3,500 ballots were received in the two days following the primary.Machines
Erie County's new touch-screen voting machines were in limited use at polling places for the primary, both to limit the potential spread of the virus and because the economic shutdown delayed delivery of some equipment. That resulted in more people voting directly on a paper ballot on Election Day.That matters, because the touchscreen machines won't allow a voter to over-vote, which occurs when a voter chooses more than the allowed number of candidates for a specific race — like choosing both Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders for the Democratic presidential nomination, or selecting six delegates to a party's national convention instead of the limit of five.
The more ballots filled out by hand, the greater the likelihood of an over-vote or another discrepancy that cannot be determined by a machine.
Write-in votes and provisional ballots
The same goes for write-in votes and provisional ballots. Elections officials have to count those types of votes and ballots.There were 876 provisional ballots in the primary, an influx from similar cycles. To ensure that someone did not vote twice, anyone who requested a mail-in ballot but showed up at their polling place instead was given a provisional ballot.
Erie County has not yet finalized its counting of write-in votes and provisional ballots. That could occur this week during a process that Smith calls "adjudication."
What now?
Erie County will review its internal procedures and other counties' procedures to find efficiencies.For example, some counties, including Allegheny and Luzerne, used electronic envelope openers to speed up the pre-canvassing process, the P.A. Post reported.
"We're going to consider in general whether there is any automation or any other processes we might employ to speed up and keep ourselves ahead of the advancing mail," Smith said.
The Dominion Voting Systems scanners purchased by the county and put in use for the first time this year can scan up to 5,000 ballots an hour, Erie County Board of Elections President Carl Anderson said.
It's likely that more manpower is needed for the election, too, Smith said, but so then is more space, especially amid the pandemic. The current elections office would not be able to accommodate additional workers because it's too small and each person needs to be at a work station that is connected to the Department of State's computer system.
"We just don't have space in the elections office to add any more work stations," Anderson said.
Smith and Anderson are also hopeful that groups like the County Commissioners Association of Pennsylvania will lobby state lawmakers to change an election law provision that prohibits mail-in ballots from being opened and sorted until polls open on Election Day. Allowing more time for the opening of envelopes and sorting of ballots would make the process of tabulating them by machine faster once polls close.
"If we had this happening Saturday or Sunday prior to the election, then most of the work we were doing in the days after the election would be done by 8 p.m. Tuesday night," Anderson said.
Even if that doesn't change, Anderson said something has to in order to make the process more efficient.
"There's no question it's a tremendous amount of work and we know there are definitely things we can do better in the fall and that we will have to do better in the fall," Anderson said. "We're expecting not a doubling, but at least a 50% to 75% increase in turnout from the primary."
©2020 the Erie Times-News (Erie, Pa.) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
