PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Philadelphia elections officials have voted to reinstate a time-consuming process to catch any instances of duplicate ballots.
The process, known as poll book reconciliation, will now occur following pressure city commissioners felt from a Republican-backed lawsuit. As a result, counting ballots in Philadelphia could take much longer than originally expected.
Commissioners met early Tuesday morning in an emergency meeting at the Northeast Philadelphia ballot counting center and voted 2-1 in favor of implementing the reconciliation process.
Republican Commissioner Seth Bluestein said the double-checking process is not needed, but he voted for it based on the pressure from the lawsuit, despite the fact that it will make Philadelphia an outlier.
“Every other county in the commonwealth — no one else does this procedure, and even those counties who have done it previously have stopped doing it,” he said. “The reason being for the last three elections, there have been no double votes.”
City Commissioners Chair Lisa Deely, a Democrat, joined Bluestein. Commissioner Omar Sabir, also a Democrat, voted no.
The emergency meeting came after a Philadelphia Common Pleas Court ruling in which the judge agreed with GOP plaintiffs in principle but ruled that the city did not have to change rules at the last minute.
As Bluestein put it: The judge’s order “did not enjoin us to do this procedure, but the opinion was written in a way that suggests we should move forward with it.”
Commissioners expect to have to count between 15,000 and 30,000 ballots in poll book reconciliation, a process Bluestein said could take a few days.
A GOP appeal in the case was scheduled in Commonwealth Court for Tuesday morning. The commissioners’ emergency vote possibly makes that hearing a moot point.
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