BUCKS COUNTY, Pa. (KYW Newsradio) — Bucks County election officials don’t want people to be thrown off by some changes they’ve made to this year’s mail-in ballots.
Bucks County Elections Director Thomas Freitag says this year’s mail-in ballots will have a yellow privacy envelope and hole punched in the outer return envelope so election workers can see right away if someone forgot the privacy envelope, which helps ensure ballots remain anonymous.
“We can't pre-canvass in Pennsylvania until 7 a.m. on election day, so we really didn't have any way of knowing that a ballot was naked prior to election day.”
State law says any “naked ballots” – ballots returned without the privacy envelope – can’t be counted. The same goes for any ballots that don’t have the correct date and signature. But Freitag says if county officials catch it before election day, they can contact the voter and tell them there’s an issue.
“Then, depending on what the error is, they could either sign it, date it. If it was naked, we'd be able to issue them a new ballot to correct that by them coming into our office.”
Bucks County said they will cover return postage for mail-in ballots that need to be corrected.
Last year, 225 naked mail-in ballots were tossed in the primary election and 492 were not counted in the general, according to Bucks County officials.
The primary election takes place May 16. The deadline to register to vote is May 1, and the deadline to request a mail-in ballot is May 9.
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