Check your mail-in ballot closely

Several reports of Pa. voters receiving incorrect materials

• Emily Previti/PA Post
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  Emily is a reporter for WITF who’s been covering voting and elections since July 2019 as part of her former role with statehouse accountability news organization PA Post. She was the senior reporter for statewide public media collaboration Keystone Crossroads. Previously, she covered city hall for PennLive/The Patriot-News (Harrisburg, Pa.), was a watchdog and city hall reporter at The Press of Atlantic City and reported for the Northwest Herald. She is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania.
  
  See other articles by Emily Previti for WITF.

In Tuesday’s Context, readers were asked to share if they were having issues with mailed ballots.

One Montgomery County voter responded to say his ballot hasn’t arrived even though he requested one online in February. I checked in with assistant solicitor John Marlatt, who told me voters in the county should start receiving any day now.

“Our ballots weren’t able to be finalized until mid-April because we were waiting on the outcome of a petition challenge in one of the races,” Marlatt wrote in an email Tuesday afternoon. “Our ballots have since been printed and we have commenced the initial delivery of several thousand ballots.”

Jody H., of Pittsburgh’s South Squirrel Hill neighborhood, got an incorrect ballot. She says she realized as she dropped her ballot in the mail that she’d voted for state Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pittsburgh), who represents the adjacent legislative district.

“I feel a little silly because I felt like I should have been conscious of that when I was voting,” said Handley, noting she’s voted multiple times for her actual 23rd District representative, Dan Frankel.

Handley notified the county says she received a new ballot within a few days.

Sara D., also a Pittsburgh Democrat, reached out to us to say she received a Republican ballot.

“I got it in the mail about a week ago, but I wasn’t going to open it right away,” Day says. “And then I was cleaning off the counter, and figured I should just open it. And, I’m like, ‘This says Donald Trump.’ I was very confused.”

Day says she double checked her registration online and everything looked correct, so she called the Allegheny County elections office on Monday. On Tuesday, the county notified her that they’re sending a new ballot and instructed her to destroy the old one.

The Pa. Department of State has said all ballots are coded to prevent a voter from casting more than one.

Ballot application processing and quality assurance procedures, however, are not uniform and left largely up to counties.

In Allegheny, county officials say they got a few reports of incorrect ballots being received, but don’t believe the issue is widespread. The county elections department has doubled staffing by hiring temps and bringing in workers from other county offices to help handle the influx of application, according to spokeswoman Amie Downs.

Downs said the county tries to prevent errors throughout the process, including keeping Democratic and Republican ballots in entirely separate rooms, separating mailing labels by party so election workers are working with only one party’s ballots at a time, and having supervisors randomly sample ballot packets to check the contents before they’re mailed.

Those quality control practices — among others — were cited by other county election officials who responded to our query on Tuesday. Several also said ballot-mixups are extremely rare.

If you experience a mail-in ballot error of any kind, please drop me an email: epreviti@papost.org.

P.S. There’s still time to apply for a mail-in ballot. Head to VotesPA.com before May 26 to fill out an application.

Related: Printer error leads to mailing of 160 incorrect Dem primary ballots in Crawford (Meadville Tribune).

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