Approximately 25 Luzerne County voters did not receive secrecy envelopes with their Nov. 7 general election mail ballots due to a brief jam in the outside vendor’s automated ballot packaging system, the county’s election bureau said.
The bureau learned about the envelope omission from impacted voters and immediately contacted the county’s ballot printing vendor — Pennsylvania-based NPC Inc. — to identify the cause, said county Election Director Eryn Harvey and Deputy Election Director Emily Cook.
NPC has surveillance cameras and determined through a review of footage that the automated system jammed for a few minutes when the impacted ballot packets were being prepared, they said.
Impacted voters can stop at the election bureau in downtown Wilkes-Barre to obtain a secrecy envelope or request that one be delivered to them, they said.
The bureau is located on the second floor of the county’s Penn Place building, 20 N. Pennsylvania Ave., Wilkes-Barre. Voters with further questions or a request to have an envelope mailed to them should contact the bureau at 570-825-1715 or by emailing elections@luzernecounty.org.
Harvey and Cook emphasized that voters must use a county-furnished secrecy envelope for their mail ballot to be counted.
After filling out their ballot, voters must place it in the blank white secrecy envelope, seal it and then put that envelope inside the outer envelope with the label/barcode to be returned to the county. The bar code, when scanned, identifies that voter in the state’s database.
Mail ballots have been sent to approximately 22,000 county voters who requested them to date.
The election bureau expects to resend ballots today to 1,557 Wilkes-Barre voters who received the wrong ballot due to a problem that occurred when the mail ballot data was exported and uploaded, officials said. At some point in the transfer, some of the Wilkes-Barre data did not line up in the correct precinct order, causing the ballots mailed to be out of sync.
Those voters are in city Wards 2 to 8 and 14 to 20.
Some reminders to ensure mail ballots are counted:
• Don’t write anything on the outside of the secrecy envelope, especially names or identifying marks.
• Sign and date the outer envelope where indicated. The date refers to when the ballot was filled out, not a birth date.
• Fully shade in the ovals on the ballot and don’t mark choices with an X or slash.
• Be careful not to select more than the specified number of candidates.
• Only one ballot should be placed inside a secrecy or mailing envelope. The county cannot count multiple ballots in the same envelope, such as those for a couple, because there would be no way to determine which ballot is tied to the voter listed on the envelope with the bar code.