Luzerne County’s mail-in ballots processed, but more work remains

Luzerne County workers finished processing all 40,300 primary election mail-in ballots Thursday night after three days of counting, but there’s one more hurdle that must be met to generate complete results.

Starting at 8 a.m. today, the county Election Board must address at least 2,800 ballots that have been flagged for various reasons to determine if those votes will be counted.

For example, workers set aside three large boxes containing more than 1,000 mail-in ballots that require a board determination, said county Information Technology Director Mauro DiMauro.

Most of these involved voters forgetting to place their ballots in secrecy envelopes, preventing workers from doing anything with them, he said.

To process mail-in ballots, workers had to open outer envelopes, shuffle the sealed secrecy envelopes inside for added confidentiality and then open the secrecy envelopes to access ballots that had to be unfolded and smoothed so they didn’t cause a jam when batches were fed into scanner/tabulators.

In at least one case, a married couple inserted both secrecy envelopes inside the same outer envelope instead of individual ones.

Some voters failed to sign their envelopes as instructed, DiMauro said.

County Assistant Solicitor Michael Butera said the general rule is that votes should be counted if the board can clearly establish the “intent of the voter.”

If someone crossed out a candidate and picked another, the vote may be counted, he said. However, if someone picked too many candidates in a race and didn’t demonstrate an attempt to cancel another, a selection may not be counted because there is no way to determine voter intent, Butera said.

Overvoting in one race does not prohibit the board from accepting selections in the rest of the ballot, he said.

About 1,800 provisional ballots also await a board determination. Usually there are only a few after each election.

Voters who had requested mail-in ballots were required to vote provisionally if they appeared at the polls Tuesday so election officials could later verify they were not voting twice.

Provisional ballots are set aside for further review instead of being fed into a scanner/tabulator like the others cast at polling places.

Because provisional ballots must be a different design than regular ballots, they can’t be fed into the tabulators if the board decides they will be accepted, said county Election Director Shelby Watchilla. As a result, workers will have to manually enter the candidate selections from each approved provisional ballot so they can be added to the election results system, Watchilla said.

With the volume of issues, the board’s review may continue into next week, officials said.

Butera said he believes this will be the longest board review process he’s witnessed in his more than 50 years of involvement in politics and official counts. He’s been serving as board solicitor since 2012.

Based on the numbers to date, about 63% of voters casting ballots Tuesday chose the mail-in ballot option, which was intended for convenience but became heavily promoted as a way to avoid safety concerns as the coronavirus pandemic unfolded.

“I’ve never seen anything like this. Nobody has seen an election like this,” Butera said.

Board Vice Chairman Peter Ouellette said write-in votes also must be tallied, including those for some Republican committee seats that had no candidates appearing on the ballot.

Ouellette said he and his board colleagues are committed to the process.

“It’s the people’s voices. They express themselves in a vote, and we have to acknowledge that,” Ouellette said.

Mail-in count

County workers finished processing the mail-in ballots shortly before 5 p.m. Thursday.

DiMauro said teams of workers from the election bureau and other departments were determined to remain at the county-owned Penn Place building in downtown Wilkes-Barre Thursday until they finished the job, he said.

“We’re moving. We’re getting in the home stretch,” DiMauro said around 3:45 p.m., when about 1,500 remained to be processed.

The envelopes couldn’t be cracked open until 7 a.m. on Election Day under state law. Employees processed the mail-ins until 10 p.m. on Election Day and from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Wednesday. They resumed at 9 a.m. Thursday, starting the day with 13,738 left to process.

Watchilla said workers pulled together to complete the painstaking assignment.

“Through the dedication and hard work of our tremendous county staff from multiple departments and their hours of long work, we were able to finish a day earlier than anticipated,” Watchilla said.

Friday’s official count will be held in the third-floor courtroom at Penn Place, located at 20 North Pennsylvania Avenue.