LANCASTER, Pa. (KYW Newsradio) — The primary election ballot count will take a few more days in Lancaster County, where 22,000 mail-in ballots were not properly scanned due to a printing issue.
The Lancaster County Board of Elections said it started the pre-canvassing process — opening envelopes and scanning mail-in ballots — Tuesday morning, but a “significant number” did not scan.
“Upon further inspection of the ballots, the county identified the ballots were printed by the mail ballot vendor, NPC, with the wrong identification code. This error prevents the ballots from being scanned on the county’s central scanners,” the board said in a statement, adding that test ballots, which had the correct code, scanned properly prior to the election.
Leigh Chapman, acting Pennsylvania secretary of state, addressed the issue during a Tuesday evening news conference about the primaries.
“We are working closely with the county to make sure that those 22,000 ballots are processed and that this doesn’t happen again for the November general election,” she said.
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The remedy, according to Chapman, is for a team of election staffers to go over every single affected ballot. In each case, a staffer will read the markings on the original ballot out loud while another worker marks the vote on a new ballot. A third person, an observer, will watch for accuracy, and then the ballot can be scanned.
It is a painstaking process that Lancaster County officials said they had to go through during last year’s primary, when there was a similar problem with a different vendor.
“These types of errors are unacceptable and we hold the vendors responsible,” the board said, also adding its opposition to ACT 77, the 2019 law that passed with bipartisan support to expand mail-in voting.
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There is no timeline for all the mail-in votes to be counted. Chapman said, otherwise, there were only a few issues on what she described as a “successful” primary election, with most of the 1,100 calls to the commonwealth’s voter help line being about registration status, polling place location or mail-in ballots.
Chapman said problems involving new electronic poll books led to long lines at two-dozen polling places in Berks County. A court order extended in-person voting to 9 p.m. in the county.
As ballots continue to be counted, the Republican race for U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania is still too close to call. Frontrunners Mehmet Oz and David McCormick are neck and neck, with only a fraction of a percentage point between the two candidates.