LANCASTER, Pa. — Starting at 7 a.m. on Election Day, pre-canvassing operations were underway at the Lancaster County Government Center in Lancaster.
Volunteers removed mail-in and absentee ballots from envelopes to begin scanning and counting the votes.
Currently, in Pennsylvania, election workers can’t begin processing ballots until 7 a.m. on Election Day. Thirty-eight other states already allow pre-canvassing before Election Day.
In Pennsylvania, however, pre-canvassing has become a partisan issue. Democrats have supported pre-canvassing, arguing that finishing the count sooner would help prevent voter mistrust in recent elections. Republicans have held up several bills that would allow early pre-canvassing, arguing that processing the ballots earlier could make the counting process less secure.
But this municipal election is another year where issues arose for the mail-in ballot process.
Last month, Lancaster County Election Officials had to let voters know that mail-in ballots came with the wrong instructions. These instructions said voters should put their ballot into the white secrecy envelope when it should have gone into the yellow envelope.
In the primary election earlier this year, nearly 19,000 ballots went out to voters with an error on them.
In May 2022, about 16,000 mail-in ballots failed to scan because of an incorrect code.
In May 2021, more than 12,000 ballots were printed out of order, preventing scanners from reading them.
"We have had some problems," said John Trescot, chair of the Lancaster County Board of Elections. "We want to get to perfection, but that’s hard to do. When making silicon chips, you try to get to 99.99999% quality control, and you still have errors."
Trescot says the envelope issue for this municipal election has been resolved and has no effect on people voting on Tuesday.
He says more than 1,400 volunteers will be working on Tuesday across Lancaster County.
On Tuesday, Trescot told FOX43 they've actually noticed a drop in the number of people voting by mail.
“I guess COVID-19 had people more concerned about it," he said. "You get a steady level of 20 to 25 percent of the voters depending on the turnout of the election.”
He continued, "7:00 a.m., you get a long line but it’s hard to tell [what turnout is] because people dribble in during the day, you think it’s going slow and then it’s 1:30 p.m. and you have a line of 50 people, so it’s really hard to predict.”