Luzerne County’s Election Board is relying on volunteer, bipartisan “transposers” to ensure Nov. 8 general election votes are properly reentered on the correct ballot types so they can be scanned and tallied, board Chairwoman Denise Williams said Wednesday.
In other new information released Wednesday, officials said 758 ballots were cast at polling places between 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. — extended voting hours approved by county court to help compensate for voters unable to cast ballots before 8 p.m. due to a paper problem.
While some transposing is necessary after each election, the need has significantly increased this time, largely due to the lack of proper-stock paper for ballot marking devices at polling places last week, Williams said.
Transposers must be sworn in, and they are working under the watch of the election board, which is also bipartisan and volunteer, on the third floor of the county’s Penn Place Building in downtown Wilkes-Barre as part of the board’s public adjudication process.
“We have quite a few volunteers working on it,” Williams said of the transposers. “We’re really grateful for them volunteering. They were here working on it all day.”
The extended-hour (8 p.m. to 10 p.m.) votes must be in the form of provisional ballots to comply with the court order, Williams said. Many polling places used emergency paper ballots or ballot marking device printouts instead, which means the selections must be transposed to provisional ballots so they can be accepted in the system, she said.
All 758 extended-hour ballots had to be set aside and not scanned in on election night due to the special circumstances.
Transposers are expected to start tackling the extended-hour ballots Thursday, Williams said.
For ballots cast before 8 p.m., the main issue requiring transposing involves voters being provided provisional ballots instead of emergency ones at the polls, Williams said.
Emergency ballots are filled out by hand and serve as a substitute backup if there is a problem with the electronic ballot marking devices, such as a power failure. Results from emergency ballots are supposed to be fed into the tabulators/scanners at polling places on election night.
In comparison, paper provisional ballots are sealed in envelopes for separate review by the board during adjudication. For example, voters also recorded as receiving mail ballots or voters not listed in the poll book at sign-in must use provisional ballots so their eligibility can be reviewed before their provisional ballot is accepted.
For provisional votes that should have been on emergency ballots, transposers must reenter the candidate selections onto ballot marking devices so the ballots can be printed out and scanned, Williams said.
Overall tally
At the close of Wednesday’s adjudication, the county had processed 113,997 ballots, said county Acting Election Director Beth McBride. The latest additions will be uploaded to the county’s online election results database at luzernecounty.org Thursday morning, which is timestamped for the public to track when tallies are refreshed.
Based on updated counts, there is potential for another 2,038 ballots to be added to the results in coming days, McBride said. With other recent additions factored in, the volume exceeds the bureau’s estimates last week that only 1,200 to 1,500 ballots were outstanding.
With 113,997 ballots tallied to date, the county’s turnout is 55.5%. There are 205,242 registered voters in the county.
If all outstanding ballots are accepted, the total count would reach approximately 116,000, or a turnout of 56.5%.
Four years ago, in the last gubernatorial general election of 2018, the county had 207,472 registered voters and 109,024 ballots cast, for a 52.55% turnout, county records show.
On the issue of mail ballots in last week’s general election, the county ended up receiving 28,992 from county voters, according to unofficial results the county submitted to the state.