Luzerne County voting equipment set for delivery to polling places today

The delivery of more than 700 ballot marking devices to Luzerne County polling places is scheduled to begin this morning for use in next week’s Nov. 7 general election, officials said.

Election Bureau management staffers worked Tuesday to seal up the equipment after using a checklist to verify no essentials were missed.

This step is of note because the county did not order and supply a sufficient quantity of paper in last year’s general election, resulting in the need for court intervention and an extension of voting hours.

The paper is for ballot marking device printouts that voters are supposed to review for accuracy before they feed them into a scanner/tabulator to cast their vote.

Polls will be open from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Nov. 7. A list of all polling places is posted on the election bureau’s main page at luzernecounty.org.

Mail ballots

General election mail ballots have been issued to 26,746 county voters who requested them, and 12,607 had been returned as of Tuesday afternoon, according to county Deputy Election Director Emily Cook.

Completed ballots must be physically in the county election bureau by 8 p.m. on election night, and postmarks don’t count.

Four drop box locations are available, but the county’s Penn Place Building in downtown Wilkes-Barre is the only site available on Election Day.

The specifics:

• Misericordia University, Passan Hall, 100 Lake St., Dallas — Wednesday through Friday, 7 a.m. to 10 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday, 7 a.m. to 8 p.m.; Monday (Nov. 6), 7 a.m. to 5 p.m.

• Hazleton Exchange Building, 100 W. Broad St., Hazleton — Wednesday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Monday (Nov. 6), 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.

• Wright Manor (main lobby), 460 S. Main Road, Mountain Top — Wednesday through Sunday, 7 a.m. to 8 p.m.; Monday (Nov. 6), 7 a.m. to 5 p.m.

• Penn Place (main lobby), 20 N. Pennsylvania Ave., Wilkes-Barre — Wednesday through Friday and also Monday (Nov. 6), 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.; Election Day, 8 a.m. to 8 p.m.

In addition, a countertop box is available in the election bureau on the second floor at Penn Place.

Mail voters who do not return their ballots also can bring the ballot package that had been sent to them — the ballot and envelopes — to their polling place so it can be voided, allowing them to vote on the ballot marking device at their polling place.

Voters who requested but never received a mail ballot can cast a paper provisional ballot at the polls.

Provisional ballots are marked by hand and reviewed last so the county can verify a mail ballot was not also received from that voter. The details are important for provisional ballots. They must be placed in a secrecy envelope, which is then inserted in an outer envelope. Three signatures — two from the voter and one from the judge of elections — are required on the outer envelope for the vote to count.

Ballot issues

An outside printer error caused an unspecified number of voters to receive mail ballot packages without the required inner secrecy envelope. The county supplied the blank envelopes to voters who detected the error, mailed out secrecy envelopes to all voters potentially impacted when the error occurred and alerted any voters who returned ballots without the inner envelopes.

Cook said Tuesday the volume of voters returning ballots without inner secrecy envelopes is “less than the normal election cycle,” which could be an indicator that the missing envelope error was not widespread.

In Wilkes-Barre, 1,557 mail voters in Wards 2 to 8 and 14 to 20 received the wrong ballots, resulting in the need to mail new ones containing the correct city races for these wards. That problem occurred when data files specifying which ballots these voters were supposed to receive did not correctly synchronize when files were merged, officials said.

County Election Director Eryn Harvey said Tuesday all mail ballots received from these wards will be segregated so the Election Board can ensure the correct ballot was returned as part of the adjudication process. Correct ballots will be scanned into the tabulator and counted. If any voters return the incorrect ballot for their city council ward race, the board will count all selections except for the city council one, she said.