Tuesday is the deadline for Allegheny County to accept mail-in ballots from last Tuesday’s primary election.
Gov. Tom Wolf extended the deadline by a week for Allegheny County and 5 other counties, because of coronavirus and unrest related to the George Floyd protests.
A steady stream of mail-in ballots has come in to the election return board over the past week. Staff there are systematically reviewing them to be counted starting Wednesday.
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Not all of the mail-in ballots that have come in since the governor's emergency extension order are being counted. They must be postmarked on or before June 2nd.
Dealing with the overwhelming response to the state's first-time ever 'vote-by-mail' option with no excuse has been challenging, especially due to the COVID crisis and consolidating polling sites.
"I could see there was chaos,” said elections judge Karen Toft.
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Toft partially blames a lack of training for poll workers, including sending out the election handbook last minute on the morning of the election.
"A 44-page handbook that they expected us to read before the polls opened, which was impossible,” Toft said.
Toft said she saw issues involving ballot security at the Penn Hills Library while they were dropping off her ballot box.
"All these open cases that were supposed to be sealed were just sitting right by the door,” Toft said.
Penn Hills had so many voters show up, a judge ordered them to extend voting hours.
Also of concern are issues over voters who requested mail-in ballots, but got them late or not at all, leading many to request provisional ballots.
"I had such a high number of provisional ballots and most of them were people who did not receive their ballot,” Toft said.
The return board works to review and reconcile those provisional ballots, which will be counted later this week.
"I'm hoping they learned from what happened in the primary and are going to change things in November,” Toft said.
The county says a lot of these problems were caused by the unprecedented circumstances caused by the COVID crisis and that most things will be back to normal in the fall, although we don't know yet if those mail-in ballots will get the same huge response in November.
For now, last minute mail-in ballots, along with overseas and military ballots, will be counted tomorrow morning.
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