How to track your mailed ballot

Some are still waiting for them to arrive.

Others are curious have been received.

Allowing Pennsylvania voters to submit their ballots by mail without an excuse is new this year. It was one of several changes included in a historic election reform bill signed into law last fall designed by state lawmakers to increase access to the ballot box.

And like with anything new, people have a lot of questions. Fortunately, there’s a way to get answers to at least some of them.

The Pennsylvania Department of State has an online tracking system that gives voters the opportunity to keep tabs if they on their ballot. Here’s how to do just that.

Where to go to track your ballot

Pennsylvania offers a tool to look up information about your ballot status at votespa.com/ MailBallotStatus.

You’ll need to enter your name, date of birth and the county in which you requested your ballot. Once you’ve submitted that identifying information, details about your ballot’s status appear on the page.

Those details include which election the ballot is for, when the request for a mailed ballot was received, when that application was processed, when the ballot was mailed to the voter, when the completed ballot was received by the county elections office and whether the ballot has been recorded.

If your ballot application has been processed

This is the date when your county processed your application.

According to Berks County elections officials, as of Tuesday the county has received about 77,000 applications.

If ballot mailed

This is the date when your county mailed your ballot to the address on your application.

Berks County election officials said ballots are being printed and sent out daily.

If ballot received

This is the date the election office gained possession of your ballot and scanned the bar code on the return envelope into its database.

However, this scanning doesn’t happen the instant ballots arrived at the election office. An enormous influx of ballots to election offices will likely contribute to some ballots not being scanned immediately.

Berks County election officials said that as of Tuesday about 25,000 ballots have been returned.

If ballot recorded

This status means your ballot has been recorded, but this doesn’t mean that your ballot has been counted.

Current election law dictates that election officials must wait until 7 a.m. on Election Day to begin opening the ballots.

Berks elections officials have rented a conference room at the DoubleTree by Hilton hotel in Reading on that day as the location to open the ballots that arrive by mail.

Commissioner Kevin S. Barnhardt has said the county will have more than 200 employees working around the clock in the conference room removing ballots from the envelopes.

Those ballots will then be transported in a locked box truck to the commissioners boardroom on the 13th floor of the Berks County Services Center, accompanied by a deputy sheriff to ensure the process is secure. There they will be run through digital scanners that tally the votes.

Any ballots that have not been opened by the time the workers leave the hotel will be taken to the commissioners boardroom for overnight storage.