STILL COUNTING: 23,000 MAIL-INS
Ballot misprint and scanning create backlog
NORRISTOWN » More than 12 hours after the polls closed in Montgomery County for the 2021 general election, the process continued on Wednesday to count more than 20,000 outstanding ballots.
Montgomery County Communications Director Kelly Cofrancisco said in a statement Wednesday that approximately 23,000 ballots were affected countywide, which could result in a delay of the final results.
“Obviously, our count of the mail-in ballots is taking a bit longer than originally planned, but we will as we always have, prioritize accuracy over speed so we will continue to go through the process to count the remaining ballots over the next several days,” said Montgomery County Chief Operating Officer Lee Soltysiak in a phone interview with MediaNews Group on Wednesday.
The county reported a 33.6 percent turnout among 595,328 registered voters, according to the county’s unofficial results dashboard for the 2021 general election.
“I think there was a lot of interest in this election, particularly the school board races, our local elections,” said Montgomery County Board of Elections Chairman Ken Lawrence Jr. “So I think it’s great to see people were coming out to vote in person or to vote by mail.”
Comparatively, in 2017, there was a 31.67 percent voter turnout for the general election.
Local elections typically have much lower turnouts than state or national elections.
There was a 15.71-percent voter turnout rate in the 2017 primary election as compared to a 27.32-percent turnout rate during the primary election in May, according to Dori Sawyer, Montgomery County’s director of elections.
When asked if he was surprised by this year’s percentages, Soltysiak said “not based on the recent trends in voting. There’s been a steady increase in voter turnout frankly at least since 2016.”
A total of 200,285 votes have been counted so far, officials said Wednesday. There were 151,027 ballots cast in-person as of 9:30 a.m. Wednesday in which “100% of the in-person votes have been recorded,” according to the county’s unofficial election results dashboard.
Montgomery County’s unofficial election results reported that 70,425 mailin ballots were received and 49,258 counted as of 9:30 a.m. Wednesday, leaving 21,167 ballots uncounted for. Cofrancisco addressed the matter in a statement on Wednesday:
“First, the county is sequestering the returned ballots related to the previously announced misprint of mail-in ballots by its printer. Affected ballots are subject to a separate verification process that was approved by the Montgomery County Board of Elections and shared with both political parties as well as the Pennsylvania Department of State.
“Second, the county encountered a higher than usual number of ballots that cannot be read by the ballot scanners. The county is following an established process for bipartisan teams to re-create the impacted ballots to make sure every eligible vote is validated and counted. This process occurs during every election as there are various reasons ballots are sometimes unable to be scanned.”
Cofrancisco told MediaNews Group that it could take “at least the next several days” to finalize the count of the outstanding ballots.
“On Election Day, you have to be ready for any number of contingency plans, and what’s important here is we have a process in place to accurately count every ballot that was eligible to be counted, and it’ll take a little longer than planned, but we will get the job done,” Soltysiak said.
Montgomery County Commissioner Joe Gale, who’s been critical of mailin voting, took to Twitter Wednesday as he reacted to the recent development.
“Yet another electron mess has been caused by Act 77, the unconstitutional Pennsylvania law that created 50 days of no-excuse mail-in voting!” Gale said
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The issue was a topic of conversation during an Oct. 7 Montgomery County Board of Commissioners meeting. Lawrence and Montgomery County Commissioner Joe Gale spoke of the error involving 16,000 mail-in ballots.
“I want to say this should not have happened. It’s unacceptable and everyone involved in the process needs to take accountability and ensure that this does not happen again,” Lawrence said last month.
In addition, officials acknowledged an issue involving four precincts in East Norriton and Norristown opening an hour late on Election Day.
In a statement issued Tuesday afternoon, a Montgomery County spokesperson said the delay occurred as a result of “equipment being delivered to the wrong polling places.” After getting a court order, those precincts remained open until 9 p.m.
“Usually I’m getting a lot of calls … only got one with the polling locations in Norristown and East Norriton, which we were able to correct. So it was a quiet election,” Lawrence said. “We had a good, safe and secure election.”