(AP) – A mistake by a company that prints ballots for several Pennsylvania counties made thousands of ballots unreadable on Tuesday as voters decided the fierce primary for governor and US Senate in one of the most important states on the battlefield of the nation.
Officials in Lancaster County, the sixth most populous state in the state, said the problem involved at least 21,000 mail ballots, only a third of which were properly scanned. The problem will force election officials to rework ballots that cannot be read by the machine, a time-consuming process that is expected to take several days. Republican-controlled county officials have promised that all ballots will be counted eventually.
“Citizens deserve to have accurate election results, and they deserve to have them on election night, not days later,” Josh Parsons, a Republican and deputy chairman of the district council of commissioners, told a news conference. “But because of that, we won’t have the final election results from these ballots in the mail for probably a few days, so that’s very, very disappointing for us.”
The Lancaster Electoral Council, of which Parsons is a member, has renewed its criticism of the 2019 U.S. Voting Act, which expanded postal voting but prevented counties from opening postal ballots before election day to check for errors.
The board said the law, passed by the legislature with bipartisan support, also forces counties to use vendors to print ballots instead of making them at home.
“Act 77 is untenable for us as counties to continue to work in elections and not have problems like this,” said Ray D’Agostino, chairman of the Lancaster board.
The vendor’s mistake left county officials with the task of manually marking thousands of new ballots, a process expected to begin Wednesday morning. For ballots that will not be scanned, district election workers will recreate the voters’ choice on blank ballots and then scan them.
Lancaster County had to use a similar process during last year’s primary election due to a typo by another provider.
Christa Miller, chief voter registration officer, said an election official would read each voter’s election, a second official would write them on a blank ballot, and an observer would make sure the election was recorded correctly.
County officials said the Kleisberg, Pennsylvania-based NPC contractor sent the county test ballots with the correct identification code, but used the wrong code in those sent to voters.
NPC, which replaced the provider fired after last year’s mistake, did not immediately respond to a message asking for comment. D’Agostino said the NPC had taken “full responsibility”.
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