Primary practice run for general election
Elections officials in the counties surrounding Allegheny started to relax Thursday after months of preparing to administer an election amid COVID-19 and days of counting thousands of mail-in and absentee ballots.
But to some, Tuesday’s primary was the appetizer. November’s general election, headlined by a likely matchup between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden, is the main course.
The officials are looking at ways to prepare for an even higher turnout and an even greater influx of mail-in and absentee ballot requests — their assessments beginning with a postmortem of what happened this past Tuesday and where their process was flawed.
Westmoreland County finished its count of nearly 40,000 mail-in and absentee ballots on Thursday, said elections official Scott Sistek — a process that got “a little faster” as they went along and were able to master the makeshift assembly line of county employees from 19 different departments.
Mr. Sistek said he had originally hoped to complete the count by Tuesday night, but as Tuesday hit and they began to see “how much work was involved in the process as it started up,” they reassessed, made a new timeline and finished faster than anticipated.
In November, the county is expecting having to process between 90,000 and 100,000 mail-in and absentee ballots, which will require more manpower and more equipment, Mr. Sistek said.
“That’s where the state can help us,” Mr. Sistek said, noting they had two highspeed scanners going for this election and want more in the coming months.
It would help, too, if they could process absentee and mail-in ballots sooner, Mr. Sistek said — a wish other officials and advocates expressed as well.
Keystone Votes, a consortium of good government and civic engagement organizations, unveiled a list of policy proposals in the aftermath of Tuesday’s primary, calling on the Legislature to amend state law to permit counties to begin processing the ballots “well before Election Day” — a tabulation that “can be done safely and securely.”
The Legislature had allowed the counties to begin tabulating at 7 a.m. on Tuesday instead of when polls closed at 8 p.m., but to many, that wasn’t enough to process an inundation of paperwork few had anticipated.
Dealing with one of the highest turnouts they had seen in a primary, Butler County officials said workers took a “victory lap” when they finished counting the ballots on Tuesday by midnight.
“That looked like Santa’s workshop in there,” county commissioner Leslie Osche said.
The biggest problem they heard, said commissioner Kevin Boozel, was someone complained about not receiving an “I Voted” sticker.
But beyond the smooth administration of their election, the commissioners said they have differences of opinion about what’s needed for November. One thing they could agree on, they said, was the deadline to request an absentee or mail-in ballot — currently up to one week before the election — needs to be moved back so counties have enough time to process the influx.
Allegheny County’s elections manager, David Voye, said their count — finished by Wednesday afternoon — had went a little longer than expected, though they had tallied all the 209,000 mail-in and absentee ballots by late Tuesday night.
The hardest part logistically, Mr. Voye said, was the physical opening and extracting of the ballots from envelopes. The more folds and creases in the ballots there are, he said, the more times the scanners jam — though he said there weren’t as many jams as he had anticipated.
“That’s a very manual and time-consuming process,” Mr. Voye said. “That took longer than we would have expected.”
In November, Mr. Voye said he thinks they’ll “need to throw more people at” the process, start earlier or work more shifts — and maybe work through the night.
Allegheny County Councilman Sam DeMarco, chair of the board of elections and of the county GOP, said giving counties more time to tally absentees is something that will have to be discussed. He noted in talks with the state, Allegheny County was expected to see between 200,000 and 250,000 mail-in and absentee ballots in November. They received 280,000 applications alone in the primary.
More time in November
Jeff Greenburg, director of elections in Mercer County, said his county did not precanvass the ballots and started from step one at 9 a.m. on Wednesday. The reason, he said, was because his staff of five had to focus on conducting an inperson election in 90 precincts.
“We did not have additional staffing to begin opening envelopes,” Mr. Greenburg said, noting in other counties, the elections department borrowed staff from other departments.
Mercer County finished tabulating those ballots on Thursday, which was sooner than they had expected, Mr. Greenburg said.
Before November, Mr. Greenburg, too, wants to see the counties have more time to process mail-in and absentee ballots. If that would have been the case on Tuesday, they’d have had 95% of the ballots flattened and ready to scan by the time polls closed, he said.
Mr. Greenburg said there needs to be a change in the minds of voters, too, who cannot afford to wait until the last minute to apply for a ballot in November. The county will start encouraging voters to apply in August, he said, so they can have a majority of the ballots in hand by September.
“It’s critical we educate or encourage voters to apply as early as possible,” Mr. Greenburg said. “We expect those mail ballots to skyrocket beyond anything we saw this week in the fall.”
But Mr. Greenburg said he thinks the primary will actually have been a more difficult election to administer, because of how they had to learn on the fly.
Even though the spotlight will be brighter in November, he said, “the lessons we learned this week are lessons we can correct easily.”