PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — County elections officials are calling on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to rule as quickly as possible on the maps for new state House and state Senate districts, as Friday was the filing deadline for challenges to those maps.
The County Commissioners Association of Pennsylvania has asked the court to expedite its decision. The organization said that while it is not weighing in on the proposed maps, it’s important the court understands the challenges the counties and voters are facing.
Chester County Commissioner Josh Maxwell is one of many county officials asking the court to rule quickly.
Maxwell said counties are already challenged trying to effectively run two elections at once, with mail-in ballots and in-person voting.
“Doing both those things in a quicker timeframe just makes printing very difficult,” Maxwell said.
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“There's already a delay in getting supplies out the door, and it's critical that we have the time to make sure that we get all the information that the public needs to have in order to vote and get their ballots counted.”
Gail Humphrey, the chief clerk with the Bucks County Board of Elections, echoes that. She said the more compressed the timeframe is to do things like getting ballots printed, the more chance there is for error.
“You have to get to a printer. They have to get printed. They have to be put in the mail, then they have to come back in the mail, and then they need to get us,” Humphrey.
“Anytime you start crunching any part of that election calendar, it causes concern and trouble.”
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Tom Freitag, director of Bucks County’s Board of Elections, said none of that process can be done until they know who is on the ballot, and that can’t happen until candidates know their districts.
“The longer this gets delayed,” Freitag said, the worse position we're put in trying to get ballots out to voters and requests to vote by mail.”
And the greater risk of error.
Maxwell added that it’s also confusing for the voter.
“A big part of what we do is education,” he said. “If we don't know what we're educating the public on, we can't let them know what they need to know in order to vote.”
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