HARRISBURG, Pa. (KYW Newsradio) — Pennsylvania’s new budget dedicates more money to elections, while banning private grants. However, calls from county officials to allow more time to prepare mail ballots for counting went unheeded.
The new budget directs $45 million to counties each year for elections.
“Money is important, and every county needs it, but it cannot buy time. And time is what we've been asking for,” said Montgomery County Chief Operating Officer Lee Soltysiak.
Counties need time, he says, to pre-canvass mail-in ballots, to open the two envelopes, and to flatten the ballots to prepare them to be scanned before Election Day. But counties are prohibited from opening envelopes before 7 a.m. on Election Day.
“We're needlessly backloading all this till two Election Day,” said Delaware County’s director of elections, Jim Allen. And the law also includes a line stating that workers must “continue without interruption” until the count is done.
“This bill … makes all the election authorities wait until Election Day — and then try to run an Ironman competition through 3, 4, 5, 6 in the morning on Wednesday,” he said.
Soltysiak said the new law will compound a human resources conundrum.
“It's harder than ever to recruit and retain election workers, and mandating that those workers work for days on end with no sleep just makes a big problem,” he said.
The new plan also blocks outside grants for elections, which became a controversy in 2020, when several counties turned to private grants to patch funding holes as they tried to manage the introduction of no-excuse mail-in ballots in the first election cycle held during a pandemic.
Now, such funding sources would be banned.