Lancaster County reports issues with mail-in ballots
Link to AP story: https://apnews.com/article/2022-midterm-elections-government-and-politics-pennsylvania-lancaster-bd842e11a00211eb61e8e4fcd53adbc8
Lancaster County reports issues with mail-in ballots
An error by a company that prints ballots for several Pennsylvania counties made thousands of mail-in ballots unreadable Tuesday as voters were deciding hotly contested primaries for governor and U.S. Senate in one of the nation’s most important battleground states.
Officials in Lancaster County, the state’s sixth most populous, said the problem involved at least 21,000 mailed ballots, only a third of which were scanning properly. The glitch will force election workers to redo ballots that can’t be read by the machine, a laborious process expected to take several days. Officials in the GOP-controlled county pledged that all the ballots will be counted eventually.
“Citizens deserve to have accurate results from elections and they deserve to have them on election night, not days later,” Josh Parsons, a Republican and vice chair of the county board of commissioners, said at a news conference. “But because of this, we’re not going to have final election results from these mail ballots for probably several days, so that is very, very frustrating to us.”
The Lancaster Board of Elections, of which Parsons is a member, renewed its criticism of a 2019 state voting law that expanded mail-in balloting but prevented counties from opening mailed ballots before Election Day to check for errors.
The board said the law, which passed the legislature with bipartisan support, also forces counties to use vendors to print ballots rather than doing them in house.
“Act 77 is untenable for us as counties to continue to work in elections and not have problems like this,” said Ray D’Agostino, chairman of the Lancaster board.
The vendor’s error left county officials with the task of having to hand-mark thousands of fresh ballots, a process that was expected to start Wednesday morning. For ballots that won’t scan, county election workers will recreate voters’ choices on blank ballots, and then scan those.
— Associated Press
Please note: the excerpt above is from the same AP story that was published in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette today. However the link to the AP Wire story on top of the page is more complete and more recent.
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The scanners couldn't read the votes, but I don't know the reason why. Maybe the fill-in circles were printed in the wrong position? I don't know, there could be lots of reasons.
So therefore a whole bunch of votes need to be re-written by hand, and the "volunteers" had better be honest. Know what I mean?
... or maybe I should say daymares.
The only good thing is, this is the primary not the general election.
These people piss me the fuck off.
“Citizens deserve to have accurate results from elections and they deserve to have them on election night, not days later,” Josh Parsons, a Republican and vice chair of the county board of commissioners, said at a news conference.
There should be lawsuits against the printer, who is no doubt a friend of somebody high up in Lancaster County gov't.
The printer that wins the contract is usually a friend of somebody high up in county government. That's all I can surmise.
each election some "vendor" messes up in some county and the county has to send out new ballots.
They usually use the same couple contractors in states within a geographic region, and it's like a box of chocolates (as the saying goes) - you never know what you're gonna get.
The printer may have made an artwork error, I don't know the circumstances. However I worked in the printing industry for almost 40 years (retired now) and I can tell you that once the customer has signed the proof, they've bought the product. What they signed is what they get. If there's an error on the proof and they signed it anyway, the customer - not the printer - is responsible for any reprint costs or other make-good costs. The only thing the printer is responsible for is a variance from the proof (error) that was made in production after the proof was signed.
This has been borne out in lawsuits many times, so I know for sure there's a story here. We just haven't heard it yet.
Just sayin'
some voters in what is the 3rd largest county (Montgomery County where one of my sisters lives) received ballots that were only printed on one side (and should have been printed on both). It didn't appear to be a "proof" issue as the printer admitted that they caught their own programming error (and apparently the contract was for them to mail them out as well) -
Chris Ullery
Bucks County Courier Times
Published 11:02 a.m. ET Oct. 4, 2021 | Updated 8:28 a.m. ET Oct. 5, 2021
About 16,000 Montgomery County voters will be sent replacement mail-in ballots in the coming weeks, after election officials were notified of a printing error Friday evening. The bad ballots were only printed on one side, and the Montgomery County Department of Voter Services says voters should destroy those ballots when they arrive, a news release from the county states.
Replacement ballots will be shipped out automatically to affected voters over the week; the county also will try to contact those voters by email, phone or mail. NPC Inc, of Claysburg, Allegheny County, pointed to a programming error as the cause for the misprints, which company CEO Chip Gallaher said was fixed soon after it was caught.
"Once the error was recognized, we immediately stopped production and began to investigate. Our investigation determined that a programming error caused the back page of the ballot to be omitted,” Gallaher said in the county release. The county election office has used NPC for "Printing & Mailing Services" since at least 2020, according to meeting minutes. The county commissioners voted 3-2 approving a $2 million, one-year contract with NPC in January.
https://www.buckscountycouriertimes.com/story/news/2021/10/04/montgomery-county-replaces-16-000-misprint-mail-ballots/5987660001/
So it does happen!
It was one of those weird cases where the printer was also the mailer. It's probably better to keep the responsibility spread out over several companies, but the election boards don't always do that when they bid out the jobs.
this is all new! They have always had the regular "absentee ballots" which would be some small batch (in relative terms out of the total number of voters in a county) that needed to be printed and mailed. And I expect some smaller counties still had the manual paper ballots with the fill-in-the-oval-and-scan tech.
But with Act-77 and then the pandemic, the need for printed ballots shot through the stratosphere!