Luzerne County Election Board accepts 93 flagged primary mail ballots, rejects 489

One by one, Luzerne County’s five-citizen, volunteer election board painstakingly inspected flagged primary election mail ballots for hours Friday to determine if they can be counted.

Despite reminders that mail ballots must be placed inside the furnished unmarked secrecy envelopes, 73 voters did not follow that step, resulting in the board’s mandatory rejection of those ballots.

Others had issues with outer envelope signatures and dates.

By the time the board wrapped up the mail ballot portion of the adjudication around 3 p.m., it had accepted 93 mail ballots and rejected 489.

The board also agreed Friday to accept 77 ballots from several polling places in which voters were incorrectly handed provisional paper ballots instead of the designated regular ones to hand-mark their selections. This error was discovered and stopped early on Election Day because the scanners/tabulators wouldn’t accept them, officials said. Poll workers segregated the unscanned ballots and turned them in for processing.

Provisional ballots are rejected by the tabulators because they must be reviewed by the election board after the election to verify the voters did not also cast mail ballots.

The 77 ballots had to be transposed onto regular ballots by a bi-partisan team seated near the board Friday so they could be scanned in. The election bureau is in the process of inspecting each locked scanner to determine if any other rejected ballots had been placed in the scanner “emergency bin” and never turned in by the judge of elections with other paperwork on election night.

Results from all ballots accepted Friday will be uploaded to the county’s online election database at luzernecounty.org on Monday so candidates will know the impact on their vote tallies, bureau representatives said.

Provisional ballots

The board must review 151 provisional ballots from the primary election — a process that started shortly after 3 p.m. Friday and will resume at 9 a.m. Monday at the county’s Penn Place building in downtown Wilkes-Barre.

Although the adjudication is open to the public, few attend. The board recently asked the bureau to look into the possibility of using a portion of the annual state election integrity grant funding to set up a system allowing the public to watch the adjudication remotely.

The first three presented provisional ballots were unanimously rejected by the board because they were not inside outer envelopes as required, even though officials said that mandate has been covered in judge-of-elections training.

Election Board Chairwoman Denise Williams noted the board has started filling out cards stating why provisional ballots are rejected and requiring the election bureau to enter that data in the voter record. Some voters at public meetings have questioned why their provisional ballots were not counted, and the bureau will now have specific reasons readily available, Williams said.

Next, the board unanimously rejected three provisional ballots because records confirmed mail ballots already were received and processed from those voters.

The board closed out the first day of adjudication by agreeing 83 provisional ballots should be accepted for further review because no mail ballots were received from these voters.

This batch may include voters who did not receive requested mail ballots because they sought them around the deadline a week before the primary or for some other reason, officials said.

The board will continue individually reviewing these 83 provisional ballots Monday to determine if signatures and other requirements are in order before deciding which will and won’t be tallied.

County Controller Walter Griffith monitored Friday’s adjudication as the Republican party representative, while Plains Township Commissioner Thomas Shubilla served as the Democratic representative. Under a procedure implemented by the board, both men had an opportunity to weigh in before the board made decisions.

In addition to Williams, citizens Alyssa Fusaro, James Mangan, Daniel Schramm and Audrey Serniak serve on the election board.

School board issue

The election bureau also made the board aware of an issue involving a portion of Larksville borough’s Ward 3, which is “split” because a section falls in the Wyoming Valley West School Board’s Region 3.

Forty school board region 3 voters — 23 Democrats and 17 Republicans — were supposed to receive the ballot with the school board race but instead were handed the one without it.

This doesn’t appear to impact the outcome on the Democratic side because Brian J. Dubaskas ran unopposed and received 369 votes, with only 1 write-in vote cast, according to the unofficial results.

However, there was no candidate on the Republican side because Dubaskas did not cross-file to appear on both party ballots like contenders in the other regions, the bureau said.

There were 30 write-in votes already cast by Republicans, according to unofficial results, and the omitted voters could bring the total to 47.

Write-in votes won’t be examined until next week, so it’s unclear if the 30 cast to date were for one person or more.

The county law office is reviewing the matter and will issue a legal opinion on how it should be addressed, officials said.