Counties put millions toward closely watched voting
Millions of dollars in firsttime state help for county elections offices is being put to work as officials take on an election that already has caused friction and talk of vote-tally frustrations.
Lehigh County received $1.2 million, Northampton County $1.1 million, and Berks County about $1.3 million from the statewide, $45 million “election integrity grant program” lawmakers approved earlier this year.
The first item in the list of permitted uses of the money is paying staff to process and count mail and absentee ballots.
The state’s top election official, acting Secretary of State Leigh Chapman, has warned results will not be available Tuesday night, in part because Pennsylvania law does not allow — as is done in some other states — mail ballots to be processed before 7 a.m. on Election Day.
Mail ballots remained a focus of attention Friday, three days after an order from the state Supreme Court directed that undated or wrongly dated mail ballots be set aside and not counted.
That order effectively reversed the previous stance taken by Chapman that those ballots were to be counted.
This week, counties had to weed through the piles of mail ballots already received to make sure those with undated and wrongly dated envelopes were separated. Beyond that, in at least some counties — including Lehigh — elections officials were puzzled over the lack of definition from the court or state of what constituted a “wrongly dated” ballot.
On Friday, Tim Benyo, election board chief clerk in Lehigh County, said his
office had decided to define “wrongly dated” as any with a date outside the range of Sept. 27 through Nov. 8, 2022.
He specifically mentioned the year, he said, because some voters have put the wrong year on envelopes.
Benyo said earlier in the week his office had received 81 undated ballots. In other counties, officials said Berks received 686 wrongly dated or undated ballots, Monroe received more than 100, Schuylkill fewer than 50, and Carbon County about 20.
The number of undated ballots in Northampton County was not available.
A spokesperson for Montgomery County, Kelly Cofrancisco, said it
had received about 96,000 returned mail ballots and “we are still reassessing the ballots in our storage facility to determine which ballots are incorrectly dated under the new guidelines.”
That work, she said, would go on through the weekend.
The set-aside ballots could be the focus of more lawsuits going forward as partisan friction continued to increase.
The top Republicans in the Senate, Majority Leader Kim Ward of Westmoreland County and President Pro Tempore of Centre County, on Friday ticked off a list of election concerns in a letter to Acting Secretary of State Leigh Chapman. Those included her office making sure that counties were
separating and not counting undated mail ballots.
Earlier in the week, Chapman said voters might be confused by “ongoing court cases and widespread mis- and disinformation.”
She specifically cited online reports tied to a letter signed by some House Republicans that Pennsylvania had sent out about 250,000 “unverified” ballots.
“That is not true,” Chapman said. “There is no such thing as an ‘unverified ballot.’ ”
Election grants
Other counties in the Lehigh Valley region received the following amounts in state election grants: Bucks, $2.5 million;
Carbon, $225,000; Monroe, $584,000; Montgomery, $3.1 million; and Schuylkill, $454,000.
Other permissible uses for the money include security, ballot printing, and training.
The law also requires counties that accept money begin processing mail ballots at 7 a.m. on Election Day and not stop until they are done.
In Lehigh County, Benyo said his staff was prepared. It has received more than 26,000 returned mail ballots. About 41,600 had been sent as of Wednesday.
“Not a problem,” he said. In Northampton — which as of Thursday had 32,895 mail and absentee ballots returned out of 41,387 sent out — the county was “fully staffed” to start processing at 7 a.m., according to spokesperson Becky Bartlett.
In Berks County, spokesperson Stephanie Weaver said its plan included a group of 15 employees reporting for work starting at 6:45 a.m. to process mail ballots, with another crew of 10 to 12 people coming in at 7:30 to 8 p.m. specifically to help with the final count. Berks has received about 23,000 returned mail ballots, she said.
In Schuylkill County, Election Bureau Director Al Gricoski said nearly 8,000 of the 10,000-plus mail ballots sent out were returned by Friday.
In previous elections, he said, workers had started processing those ballots later in the day but “we are fine to start at 7 o’clock.”
In Montgomery, Cofrancisco called the 7 a.m. requirement “business as usual.”
Workers are scheduled in four-hour shifts, she said, and allowed to sign up for as many shifts as they feel they can manage.
She said, “Historically, we move through about 6,000 ballots an hour.”
Bucks County spokesperson Jim O’Malley said about 75% of the 98,000 requested mail ballots had been returned. The county, he said, would use workers from various county offices to help process and count mail ballots and get results to the public as quickly as possible.
In Carbon County, Election Director Lisa Dart said more than 5,400 mail and absentee ballots were sent out and more than 4,300 returned. She said the staff would have no problem with the 7 a.m. start for processing those ballots.