LANCASTER COUNTY, Pa. — An error by a company that prints ballots for several Pennsylvania counties made thousands of mail-in ballots unreadable Tuesday as voters were deciding hotly-contested primaries for governor and U.S. Senate in one of the nation's most important battleground states.
Officials in Lancaster County, the state's sixth most populous, said the problem involved at least 21,000 mailed ballots, only a third of which were scanning properly. The glitch will force election workers to redo ballots that can't be read by the machine, a laborious process expected to take several days. Officials in the GOP-controlled county pledged that all the ballots will be counted eventually.
Due to the work involved in counting the ballots manually, the Lancaster County Board of Elections put out a call on Tuesday for volunteers to help with the remarking process, as well as more volunteers to observe the remarking process.
“Citizens deserve to have accurate results from elections and they deserve to have them on election night, not days later," Josh Parsons, a Republican and vice chair of the county board of commissioners, said at a news conference. "But because of this, we’re not going to have final election results from these mail ballots for probably several days, so that is very, very frustrating to us.”
The Lancaster Board of Elections, of which Parsons is a member, renewed its criticism of a 2019 state voting law that expanded mail-in balloting but prevented counties from opening mailed ballots before Election Day to check for errors.
The board said the law, which passed the legislature with bipartisan support, also forces counties to use vendors to print ballots rather than doing them in house.
“Act 77 is untenable for us as counties to continue to work in elections and not have problems like this,” Ray D’Agostino, chairman of the Lancaster board said.
The vendor's error left county officials with the task of having to hand-mark thousands of fresh ballots, a process that is expected to start Wednesday morning. For ballots that won’t scan, county election workers will recreate voters’ choices on blank ballots, and then scan those.
Lancaster County had to use a similar process during primaries last year because of a printing error by a different vendor.
Christa Miller, chief clerk of voter registration, said an elections worker will read out each voter’s choices, a second worker will record them on a blank ballot, and an observer will make sure the choices are marked correctly.
“Our main priority is accuracy and not how fast we can do something,” she said.
County officials said the contractor, Claysburg, Pennsylvania-based NPC, sent the county test ballots with the correct ID code, but used the wrong code on the ones sent to voters.
NPC, which replaced the vendor fired after last year's error, did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment. D’Agostino said NPC had taken “full responsibility.”
You can watch the full press conference addressing the issue below:
The Pennsylvania Department of State said it was aware of the problem in Lancaster County, which went for Donald Trump by about 16 percentage points over Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential contest.
Pennsylvania is one of five states that held primaries Tuesday, along with Idaho, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Oregon. According to the Associated Press, election officials in Oregon have been left with the same task of redoing thousands of mailed ballots.
If you're interested in helping remark ballots, volunteers will be needed for the next few days, anytime between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m.
The remarking process will be taking place in the big conference room (Room 102 through 104) of the Lancaster County Government Building at 150 North Queen Street in Lancaster.
If you can assist, the Lancaster County Board of Elections said in a statement Tuesday that volunteers can simply arrive at Room 102 through 104 between the above hours and help out over the next few days. Interested volunteers can also reach out to the Lancaster County Democratic Committee Chair Diane Topakian at 717-319-3661 or dtopakian@gmail.com.
Questions regarding this issue can be addressed by calling the Board of Elections at 717-299-8293.