TOM LISI | Staff Writer Last November, volunteers working the midterm election stayed until the early morning hours to count and log results from Lancaster County’s mail-in ballots.
But in Tuesday's primary, election volunteers were on their way home four hours before the polls closed, county officials said Friday during a brief board of elections meeting.
The quick turnaround was the result of new high-speed scanners purchased by Lancaster County this year, election officials said Friday.
In less than four hours, according to elections director Christa Miller, the scanners processed nearly 16,000 ballots, a faster pace even than the separate machine election staff use to open ballot envelopes.
“I can definitely say that those six new high-speed scanners are actually high-speed and not low-speed like our old three,” Miller said. “We didn’t even start scanning ballots until close to 11 a.m. and were fully caught up by 2:30.”
The new scanners, which can each scan about 125 ballots a minute, removed the bottleneck that plagued Lancaster County elections in the three years since no-excuse vote-by-mail became an option in Pennsylvania.
Whereas the processing of mail-in ballots delayed the county’s ability to quickly report meaningful results in the past, the new scanners mean the vast majority of mail-in ballots now will be scanned and counted before in-person vote totals from precincts around the county are in.
That’s even as election officials under state law can’t begin scanning mail-in ballots until 7 a.m. on Election Day.
While the scanners were a resounding success on Tuesday, the number of mail-in ballots in the municipal primary was just a fraction of what the county received in recent midterm and presidential elections, when federal and statewide contests generate more voter interest.
For the Tuesday primary, election officials processed 16,477 mail-in ballots, while in November, the county received more than 44,000.
Still, Miller said at a Friday board of elections meeting, in high-turnout races the scanners should be able to process all the mail-in ballots close to when voting ends at 8 p.m.
In 2020, the county was able to process 90,000 mail-in ballots quickly only with the help of 150 volunteers who worked all Election Day in a large room in the Lancaster convention center.
Replacement ballots
Of the roughly 3,400 voters who received mail-in ballots containing a printing error, Miller said 210 voters sent in the erroneous ballot without later returning the corrected replacement version the county sent to all mail-in voters.
Voters who did not return a replacement version of their mail-in ballot could choose to go to the polls on Tuesday to vote provisionally, and the elections office still has to investigate 418 provisional ballots.
The ballot error involved just the state Superior Court judge race. Voters were supposed to be directed to vote for two candidates, but the ballot said to choose one.
If any of the 210 voters who returned uncorrected mail-in ballots did not vote provisionally, the votes on the original ballot will still be counted, county officials have said. If one of these voters cast just one vote for Superior Court judge, it will still be counted, county officials said.
Early poll pad reviews
Voters and election officials at seven voting precincts on Tuesday were part of a trial run of electronic pollbooks. The devices are essentially Apple iPads with special software that takes the place of traditional paper pollbooks.
No issues arose in the tryout and the feedback was very positive, Miller said. Judges of elections at the trial voting locations reported that the poll pads, also called e-poll books, streamlined the process of looking up voters and gave workers more information to determine if a given voter was in the right precinct.
The elections office will develop a report on the trial for the board of elections later this year, Miller said.
