Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Mail-in ballot requests soar in Chesco
As legislators in Harrisburg fight over what changes should be made in state election laws ahead of the November Presidential Election in this year of COVID-19, officials in Chester County are seeing record numbers of requests for absentee and mail-in ballots.
As of Friday morning, the county’s Office of Voters Services had processed 97,621 requests to have a ballot for the Nov. 3 sent to the registered voter’s home address so that he or she would not have to appear at their polling place on Election Day and face the possibility of exposure to the coronavirus, according to information from the county.
That works out to an estimated 2,077 requests for a ballot each day since the state began accepting on-line requests at the end of June. The requests came from 61,302 registered Democrats, 23,779 Republicans, and 10,6874 independents.
County officials said that they expected the number of requests to top 100,000 by the close of business Friday and double that number by Election Day. By contrast, there were a total of 365,420 registered voters in the county as of Aug. 31. But the process for collecting and counting the ballots returned from those requests remains in doubt, said County Administrator Bobby Kagel in an in
terview last week.
Will the county be permitted to count the returned ballots sometime prior to Election Day, or not until the day the race comes down to its end? How will voters be allowed to return their ballots — by mail only, or at a dropbox of alternative polling location? Where and how many drop boxes will be utilized in the days and weeks leading up to the vote? And how long will it take for county residents — and the rest of the nation — to know whether Chester County went blue for former Vice President Joe Biden or red for President Donald J. Trump?
“We are still in the process of putting together our plans,” said Kagel on Friday in a telephone interview. “(Things) change almost weekly. There is all sorts of litigation going on statewide, and the Legislature is talking about changes they are going to make. We are waiting to be able to have a better idea.”
The state House of Representatives last week passed legislation supported by Republicans and opposed by the Democratic minority and Gov. Tom Wolf that would make incremental, but significant, changes in the mailin voting process that was approved by the General Assembly in 2019.
One key aspect of the bill will allow counties to start processing mail-in ballots three days before Election Day to speed up vote-counting amid concerns that a presidential election result will hang in limbo for days on a drawn-out vote count in Pennsylvania.
Democrats, however, want to give counties more time, as many as 21 days before the election. That position is backed by the County Commissioners Association of Pennsylvania and the AARP.
Another provision shortens the time period in which voters can request a mail-in ballot, from a week before the election to 15 days before, after thousands of mailedin ballots arrived after polls closed in the June 2 primary.
Democrats instead want to extend the deadline to count mailed-in ballots to three days after the election, citing concerns over slower postal service.
The bill also prescribes specific locations where voters can deliver mailin ballots by hand: to a county courthouse, permanent election office and polling places on Election Day.
Democrats oppose that provision, too. They say it effectively bans the drop boxes that Philadelphia — home to one in five registered Democratic voters in Pennsylvania — and some southeastern Pennsylvania counties used in the primary to help handle the avalanche of mailin ballots and plan to use again in November.
Wolf has threatened to veto the bill as it is now constructed, with the state Senate set to take up similar legislation this week.
In the county, Kagel said that the preliminary plans that the county Board of Elections is expected to consider sometime later this month generally would include an increase in the number of drop-box locations from the five that were hastily put together prior to the June 2 Primary Election.
Ballot drop boxes would be staffed, and perhaps deployed at library branches across the county. Each box would be returned to the Voters Services Office each night and the ballots there initially processed.
The question of when the ballots will be counted is significant. Currently, voting officials cannot begin a count of mail-in and absentee ballots until 7 a.m. on Nov. 3. In the June election, final results were not known until the week following, with 77,000 or so ballots coming by mail.
“We would love to be able to start counting the ballots up to three weeks prior to the election, but anything would be better than 7 a.m. on Election Day,” Kagel said. He expected to have the additional 25 to 30 workers hired for the election in the Office of Voter Services working around the clock to finish processing the ballots regardless.
An additional question remains what the ballot will look like exactly. Democrats in the state are challenging paperwork filed by the Green Party to get its candidates on the fall election ballot for president and several statewide offices.
Monday’s filing in the state’s Commonwealth Court said the Green Party’s paperwork contained “numerous defective signatures, illegible signatures, signatures of unregistered voters, signatures in the handwriting of others and signatures of fictitious persons.” The county cannot print the ballot it will send to voters who have requested one until the court decides whether to grant the challenge or not.
“We haven’t printed a ballot yet,” said Kagel. “We are aware of the litigation in Commonwealth Court over the Green party’s appearance on the ballot. The (county) commissioners have asked the President Judge (of the appellate court) to have a ruling on the ballot issue as soon as possible so we can resolve the issue.”
Kagel remains optimistic that the county will not face any significant loss of polling places or workers come Election day. A recent recruitment event for poll workers drew about 300 new applications; there are 2,300 poll workers needed overall.
“It is frustrating to be asked to plan for such an important election with so many unanswered questions,” he allowed. “But our job is to do the best we can with the resources we have.”