The day before a primary election that will be unlike any other due to the coronavirus outbreak and changes in state voting laws, Pennsylvania’s top elections official is calling for patience.
Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar said Monday morning that counties have been sent equipment to protect voters and poll workers, and that local officials are as prepared as they can be to conduct safe elections.
“Please be patient though, because it’s not going to look or feel like it does in nonpandemic times and the results may take longer,” she told reporters during a virtual news conference.
In addition to the pandemic, the demonstrations over George Floyd’s death will affect some results. Monday evening, Gov. Tom Wolf extended the deadline to receive and count mail-in ballots in six counties — Allegheny, Dauphin, Delaware, Erie, Montgomery and Philadelphia — that were part of a disaster emergency declaration over the civil unrest. They still must be postmarked by Tuesday in order to be counted, but will be counted as long as they are received before 5 p.m. June 9.
Tuesday’s primary will be marked by a number of changes to how voters cast their ballots. It’s the first time that any voter can cast a mail-in ballot without providing an excuse for why they can’t make it to the polls; 1.8 million voters requested to vote by mail, a 17-fold increase over the 2016 presidential primary, Boockvar said.
More than 1.1 million Pennsylvanians have already submitted their primary ballots, she said. In Lehigh County, more than 30,000 of 48,000 mail ballots were returned as of Monday morning, according to county officials. Northampton County officials said late last week that 23,000 of 44,000 ballots were returned.
Mailed ballots in most of the state, including the Lehigh Valley, must be received at a county election office by 8 p.m. Tuesday. Voters who requested a mail ballot but did not return it in time can vote by provisional ballot at their polling site or drop off the ballot at the county elections office (17 S. Seventh St., Allentown, in Lehigh County; Northampton County Courthouse, 669 Washington St., Easton, in Northampton County).
Roughly one-third of Pennsylvania’s counties also will be using new voting machines for the first time, due to a state requirement that machines have a paper trail. The Lehigh Valley rolled out its updated equipment last year, when Northampton County saw widespread problems with the new touch screen machines.
In addition, every county had to grapple the coronavirus outbreak that shut down the state. County election officials had to mail out more ballots, replace poll workers, shift precinct locations, and gather masks, hand sanitizer and other supplies, which state officials also distributed.
The mounting challenges mean that there’s likely to be some delays in vote counting, Boockvar said. While counties will submit their unofficial tallies as quickly as they can, their “first priority is to accurately count each vote,” Boockvar said.
Washington correspondent Laura Olson can be reached at 202-780-9540 or lolson@mcall.com.
