Election count in focus in Chester County
WESTCHESTER » Sunrise inWest Chester is due at 6:35 a.m. on Nov. 4, about 24 hours after the first in-person votes in the 2020 presidential election are expected to be cast across Chester County and the state, which will play a crucial, if not deciding, role in the contest.
That is the hour at which Chester County election officials are setting as theirunofficial, if somewhat optimistic, deadline to have
all of the thousands of ballots cast in the much-discussed election counted and ready for public reporting, easing whatever disputes might arise if the results in the county were delayed for days, as has been predicted in themonths leading up to the Nov. 3 election.
“That is the goal,” county commissioners’ Vice Chairman Josh Maxwell said in an interview Friday. “We will keep counting until we are done, before sunrise the next day.”
To meet that ambitious deadline, the county will hire as many as 225 temporary workers to work around-the-clock shift processing the unprecedented number of mail-in and absentee ballots being cast in the election that pits President Donald Trump against former Vice President Joe Biden, Maxwell said. They will work in eight-hour shifts at a special ballotcounting site at West Chester University to process those ballots that the state’s voters are being allowed to cast prior to Election Day for the first time.
The electionworkers will likely have their work cut out for them.
According to officials with the county Office of Voter Services, as of Monday, Oct. 5, 139,038 of the county’s 371,686 registered voters, or 37 percent, had requested mail-in or absentee ballots for the Nov. 3 election. The majority of those had come from registered Democrats — 80,005 — and Independents — 20,187 — with a far smaller number of registered Republicans — 34,265.
By last Monday, the county had mailed out 133,457 ballots, with more than 35,500 returned by voters to the election office as of Thursday, officials reported.
Voters appeared in steady streams at the county’s three operating dropoff box sites as of Friday, the Oxford Public Library, Henrietta Hankin Library in Chester Springs, and the county Government Services Center in West Goshen. Ten additional drop box locations, local public libraries, will be open Tuesday, Oct. 13, three weeks before Election day.
Under state law, county elections officials cannot begin counting absentee and mail ballots until the morning of Nov. 3, leading officials to fear it may be days before the vote count is official.
In an election cycle that has seen President Donald Trump baselessly cast doubt on the legitimacy of mail voting, many fear that any delay in results could give the president more room to continue his attacks.
Democrats are requestingmail-in ballots at higher rates than Republicans in many states, giving rise to the notion that Trump could enjoy election night leads — a so-called “red mirage” — only to see that
edge slowly vanish as mailin ballots are tallied over the days that follow.
Potential problems are looming most acutely in Pennsylvania, which is being hotly contested by Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden. Republican state lawmakers there have not allowed additional time to process ballots that arrive before Election Day, despite pleas from local election officials.
Pennsylvania is expected to see 3 million or more mail-in ballots — half of this year’s total and a tenfold increase from 2016. Registered Democrats are applying at a rate of nearly 3 to 1 over Republicans.
“The longer it takes for the election results to be known, the greater the risk that they’re going to be questioned and secondguessed, and that we’re going to be that national news story that we really don’t want to be,” said Lisa Schaefer, executive director of the County Commissioners Association of Pennsylvania.
The seemingly mundane administrative task of processing ballots — verifying signatures and other voter information to ensure legitimacy, and separating them from their envelope so they are ready to be tabulated — essentially readies ballots for counting on Election Day. That helps speed up the release of results.
County officials have pushed Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf and state lawmakers to set aside a larger partisan fight and let them process mail-in ballots before Election Day. They argue that doing sowill speed up vote-counting amid concerns that the presidential election result will hang in limbo over a drawn-out count.
The Associated Press, however, reportedWednesday that state lawmakers have been holding closeddoor discussions that could lead to changes that would allow counties to begin counting mail and absentee ballots as soon as four or five days in advance of the election.
“I think Republican and Democratic lawmakers realize there needs to be technical changes to take the burden off county officials and to allow themto count ballots earlier,” state Attorney General Josh Shapiro said. “It offers no advantage to either party and itmakes sense. It builds on Act 77, a very strong and progressive law that passed with more Republican and Democratic votes and allows more people to vote.”
Maxwell said that he, too, hoped the Legislature would grant election officials to begin a “pre-canvassing” effort before Nov. 3, in which returned ballots would be opened, checked for accuracy, a prepared to be processed on Election Day.
“It would save us a lot of time, and make Election Day a lot smoother,” he said.
As it stands, the ballots that are being returned are processed only to determine what precinct they had come from an whether
they initially met the requirement that they include a voter’s signature. Last week, Voter Services Director Bill Turner said that if a voter had failed to include a signature, staff were attempting to notify them of the error so that the ballot could be “cured.” Otherwise, it would be disqualified. As of Thursday, 30 such ballots had been identified.
Ballots that have been returned are being stored in a secure facility at the Government Services Center, under 24-hour surveillance until they are ready to be moved to the Ehinger Gym at WCU, which is being readied as the site of the mail-in ballot counting.
It will be an unprecedented election in many ways, startingwith the ability of voters to fill out their ballots and return them to election officials before Election Day dawns. More than that, the number of voters in the county is expected to be the largest in history with turnout possibility entering the unheardof range of 80 percent.
The current number of registered voters — 371,686 in the county and 8.89 million in the state — will almost certainly increase before the cutoff date for registering, Oct. 19, said G. Terry Madonna, a veteran observer of Pennsylvania politics and director of the Center for Politics and Public Affairs at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster,
“It’s going to go up,” Madonna said last week in an interview, pointing to unusual interest among younger voters — so-called millennials and “Gen-Zers — and the ability to cast a ballot without standing in line on Election Day.
“We are going to see a larger than usual turnout, I don’t think there is any doubt about that,” Madonna said.
In 2016, when Trump defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton in the state by 44,292, despite Clinton carrying Chester County by 25,568 votes, the turnout on Election Day was 77.5 percent here. Should that number of people also cast votes this year, that would mean almost 290,000 votes. (In 2000, there were a total of 293,000 voters in the county.)
The suburbs are “critically important” in the election, Madonna confirmed, as Trump is increasingly not faring as well in working class voting areas such as Northeast and Southwest Pennsylvania as he had in 2016. “He’s getting beaten by large numbers in the suburbs,” the pollster said.
“Chester County, and the three other suburban counties around Philadelphia, are particularly important this year. They are no longer a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Republican Party,” Madonna said
The Associated Press contributed to this story.