Bethlehem Area School Board candidate not on some ballots

A printing error caused a Bethlehem Area School Board candidate to be left off some Lehigh County ballots, the latest in a series of miscues that have marred the Lehigh Valley’s most recent election.

Lehigh County Executive Phillips Armstrong said Wednesday that Republican Kyle Miceli’s name was omitted from some ballots in Bethlehem and Fountain Hill precincts on Election Day. Armstrong said he does not believe the omission changed the outcome of the race, where the top three vote-getters won seats.

Miceli, a 2019 Freedom High graduate, finished about 4,900 votes behind the third-place finisher. None of the candidates received more than 2,700 votes in Lehigh County, Armstrong said. The Bethlehem Area School

District is in both Lehigh and Northampton counties.

Still, Miceli called Wednesday for a do-over. “They must nullify the results and call for a new election,” he said in a statement.

No one reported Miceli’s exclusion to the county, including Miceli’s campaign or the Lehigh or Northampton Republican committees, Armstrong said. Instead, the mistake came up during the county’s routine postelection checks of the voting, a process called canvassing.

Miceli’s absence from the main paper ballot was discovered last week when Lehigh County Chief Registrar Tim Benyo punched an emergency ballot into the system. While reviewing the software, he noticed that print ballots only listed three of the four candidates.

“I am really proud we were the ones who caught the error,” Armstrong said. “I am very happy this system allowed us to catch this error.”

Lehigh County has mailed letters notifying the candidates of the error, but official word had not reached them as of Wednesday afternoon.

Kyle’s father and campaign manager, Jack Miceli, said the numbers appeared odd on Election Day because all the Democrat candidates were so close. They reached out to the Northampton County Republican Party, Jack Miceli said, but didn’t hear back.

“We knew we had a slim chance,” Jack Miceli said. “The Democrats had an advantage over him.”

Miceli was a late addition to the ballot. He lost a three-way primary race for a district seat on the board but then was nominated to replace Lisa McHale after she dropped out of the at-large race this summer.

Democrat Dean Donaher, one of the likely winners, said he heard someone mention on Election Day that Kyle Miceli’s name wasn’t on the ballot, but that was never confirmed.

Lehigh County rolled out a new voting system this year in which voters cast their ballots on paper and scan them into a computer. The paper ballots are stored in the scanners, which allow the county to perform a paper audit if necessary. Gov. Tom Wolf ordered all counties to have paper backup systems by the 2020 presidential election, and many counties used this year’s municipal election as a trial run.

When Lehigh County officials tested the system in front of observers from both parties, they used a master list that included Miceli. The different versions of the ballots arrived in waves, with the absentee ballots coming first, followed by provisional ballots and finally the regular ballots. Miceli was included on the absentee and provisional ballots, Benyo said, but not the main paper ballots.

“There was no reason to believe [the regular ballots] would be any different,” Benyo said.

The ballots were printed by Reliance Graphics of West Chester. Vice President Jack Armstrong said he was notified of the error Wednesday afternoon but has not had an opportunity to review his files. He suspects the company printed an earlier version of the ballot that did not include Miceli.

“We just printed the wrong one,” he said. “I wish it hadn’t happened. We try to be perfect every time. A small mistake can be a big problem.”

The Lehigh Valley’s biggest Election Day headaches occurred in Northampton County, which had switched to a voting system that uses touch screen computers that print paper copies of the cast ballots. But that system experienced several problems: Digital counts of the votes missed thousands of votes in races involving cross-filed candidates, and the machine’s touch screens made it difficult for some people to cast votes.

Republican officials have not ruled out contesting the results in the county judicial race, where Republican Victor Scomillio appears to have lost by about 1,000 votes. In addition, Tom Carroll, a Republican trailing Democrat Terry Houck in the district attorney race, has refused to concede.