Still deep in primary ballot processing, Luzerne County Election Board faces recount

For the third day in a row, Luzerne County’s Election Board spent Wednesday painstakingly reviewing provisional and flagged mail ballots, with the tallying of approximately 11,000 primary election write-in votes yet to be completed.

On top of that, the board learned Wednesday that a recount in the U.S. Senate race also must be completed.

Acting Secretary of State Leigh M. Chapman issued notice Wednesday afternoon that she will order a statewide recount required by state law because the top two unofficial winners —Mehmet C. Oz and David H. McCormick — have vote totals within a one half of 1% margin.

As of Wednesday evening, unofficial May 17 primary results from all 67 counties recorded these tallies, according to the state: Oz, 419,409 (31.21%); McCormick, 418,528 (31.15%); Kathy J. Barnette, 331,411 (24.66%); Carla Herd Sands, 73,216 (5.45%); Jeffrey A. Bartos, 66,507 (4.95%); Sean Peter Gale, 20,223 (1.51%); and George A. Bochetto, 14,409 (1.07%).

Counties must start their recount by next Wednesday, or June 1, although they may begin as early as Friday, the state said. The recount completion deadline is noon on June 7, with results submitted to the state by noon the following day.

The state estimated the recount will cost taxpayers more than $1 million and was in the process of determining whether any costs would fall on counties.

County Election Director Michael Susek said all of the approximately county’s 60,000 ballots must be recounted.

While he was still awaiting formal state guidance Wednesday afternoon, Susek said he expects the process will be similar to the statewide recount in the Commonwealth Court race last November.

The state did not require the county to perform a hand recount at that time, which would have forced the county to assign bipartisan teams to manually review each ballot individually. Instead, the county was permitted to rescan all paper ballots using its electronic tabulators.

Susek said that would mean all ballots must be fed through tabulators again — provisional, mail and the ones voters placed into the scanners at polling places. The polling place ballots drop into a container and are retained to create a paper trail.

Unofficial returns for the May 17 primary election are posted at electionreturns.pa.gov.

County tally

Based on state guidance, the county election board ended up processing 256 mail ballots that were missing dates or had dates outside the permissible period on the outer return envelope, board Chairwoman Denise Williams said Wednesday.

Voters are supposed to sign and date the outer envelope.

A federal court ruled Friday that mail ballots without a required date on the return envelope must be allowed in a 2021 county judge race in the state.

Susek said all 256 ballots were time-stamped by the election bureau to verify they were received in the bureau within the required time period. That range is from April 30 — when most ballots were sent to voters by the county — and 8 p.m. on Election Day, when ballots were due, officials said.

Although the votes cast in these 256 ballots will be factored in the county’s unofficial count, Williams stressed the county is following state guidance and segregating them. That would allow those votes to be extracted and deducted from the tally if counties are ordered to do so in the future, she said.

Most of Wednesday’s board review at the Penn Place Building in downtown Wilkes-Barre focused on about 280 provisional ballots, Williams said.

Provisional ballots are marked by hand and reviewed last so the county can verify a mail ballot was not also received from these voters. The board also must confirm there are three required signatures on the outer envelope — two from the voter and one from the judge of elections, Williams said.

In addition, checks must be completed ensure the voters are registered.

Provisionals that pass this test must then be unsealed to confirm the ballot is inside a blank inner secrecy envelope without any identifying marks on this envelope, Williams said.

In the end, the board accepted 170 provisional ballots, Williams said.

Transposing by a bipartisan team also was required Wednesday for 14 provisional ballots cast by voters at the wrong polling place, Williams said. In this situation, the county can only accept votes for races that would have been on the ballot in the correct polling place.

There also was at least one case in which a nonpartisan voter selected candidates instead of voting only on ballot questions as permitted in a closed primary, she said.

The board will convene 9 a.m. Thursday to start tackling write-ins and adjudicating provisional and mail ballots in which voters selected more than the allowable number of candidates or made “ambiguous marks” for their selections, Williams said.