Printing Error Affects Mailed Ballots in Pennsylvania County

By GEOFF MULVIHILL and MICHAEL RUBINKAM, Related Press

An error by an organization that prints ballots for a number of Pennsylvania counties made hundreds of mail-in ballots unreadable Tuesday as voters have been deciding hotly contested primaries for governor and U.S. Senate in one of many nation’s most essential battleground states.

Officers in Lancaster County, the state’s sixth most populous, mentioned the issue concerned not less than 21,000 mailed ballots, solely a 3rd of which have been scanning correctly. The glitch will pressure election staff to redo ballots that may’t be learn by the machine, a laborious course of anticipated to take a number of days. Officers within the GOP-controlled county pledged that every one the ballots can be counted finally.

“Residents need to have correct outcomes from elections they usually need to have them on election evening, not days later,” Josh Parsons, a Republican and vice chair of the county board of commissioners, mentioned at a information convention. “However due to this, we’re not going to have ultimate election outcomes from these mail ballots for most likely a number of days, in order that may be very, very irritating to us.”

The Lancaster Board of Elections, of which Parsons is a member, renewed its criticism of a 2019 state voting legislation that expanded mail-in balloting however prevented counties from opening mailed ballots earlier than Election Day to verify for errors.

The board mentioned the legislation, which handed the legislature with bipartisan help, additionally forces counties to make use of distributors to print ballots relatively than doing them in home.

“Act 77 is untenable for us as counties to proceed to work in elections and never have issues like this,” mentioned Ray D’Agostino, chairman of the Lancaster board.

The seller’s error left county officers with the duty of getting to hand-mark hundreds of recent ballots, a course of that was anticipated to start out Wednesday morning. For ballots that received’t scan, county election staff will recreate voters’ decisions on clean ballots, after which scan these.

Lancaster County had to make use of an identical course of throughout primaries final yr due to a printing error by a unique vendor.

Christa Miller, chief clerk of voter registration, mentioned an elections employee will learn out every voter’s decisions, a second employee will file them on a clean poll, and an observer will be sure the alternatives are marked appropriately.

“Our most important precedence is accuracy and never how briskly we are able to do one thing,” she mentioned.

County officers mentioned the contractor, Claysburg, Pennsylvania-based NPC, despatched the county check ballots with the right ID code, however used the improper code on those despatched to voters.

NPC, which changed the seller fired after final yr’s error, didn’t instantly reply to a message searching for remark. D’Agostino mentioned NPC had taken “full duty.”

The Pennsylvania Division of State mentioned it was conscious of the issue in Lancaster County, which went for Donald Trump by about 16 proportion factors over Joe Biden within the 2020 presidential contest. Spokesperson Ellen Lyon mentioned no different counties have reported comparable points.

Pennsylvania is one among 5 states holding primaries Tuesday, together with Idaho, Kentucky, North Carolina and Oregon.

Officers in Oregon, the place all registered voters obtain a mailed poll, are coping with an identical drawback. About half the ballots despatched to voters in Clackamas County, the state’s third most populous, included a blurry bar code that can’t be learn by ballot-scanning machines.

Groups that embody each Democrats and Republicans are duplicating each poll to allow them to scanned. Ben Morris, a spokesman for the secretary of state’s workplace, mentioned the outcomes may very well be delayed however can be correct.

Clackamas County consists of a part of Oregon’s new sixth Congressional District, shaped after the state gained a U.S. Home seat following the 2020 census.

In North Carolina, election officers have been investigating delays at some polling locations.

Karen Brinson Bell, govt director of the North Carolina State Board of Elections, mentioned officers have been inspecting whether or not voting machine issues delayed ballot openings in three counties — Gates, Warren and Wilson. Officers have been making an attempt to find out whether or not the delays left anybody unable to solid a poll and whether or not voting hours would have to be prolonged.

“With over 2,600 polling locations open and the opportunity of delays in three, I feel that’s a reasonably good batting common,” Bell mentioned throughout a convention name with reporters.

Voters throughout North Carolina solid about 580,000 early ballots, the overwhelming majority of them at in-person polling locations. That is greater than twice as many early ballots solid as throughout the 2018 main.

Bell mentioned the excessive turnout “is indicative, we hope, of North Carolinians’ religion and belief in election officers conducting elections for them.”

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