Dallas City News

Luzerne County’s Election Board and a team of workers wrapped up the processing and uploading of Nov. 5 general election mail ballots around 2:30 a.m. Wednesday at the county’s Penn Place Building in downtown Wilkes-Barre, said board Chairwoman Denise Williams.

In total, 40,776 mail ballots were cast, Williams said. That equates to nearly 27% of the 152,333 total ballots cast.

That is the highest number of mail ballots since the last presidential general election in 2020, when 49,575 voters chose the mail ballot option that became available that year in Pennsylvania with no requirement to provide a reason or “excuse.”

In the county primary and general elections held between these two presidential generals, the number of returned mail ballots ranged from 12,981 to 34,668, according to county election bureau statistics.

Turnout

With 152,333 total ballots cast, the county’s turnout was 72.64%, according to the unofficial results posted shortly before 3 a.m. Wednesday at luzernecounty.org .

The county ended up with 209,718 registered voters on Election Day.

There may be a bump in turnout when the board publicly reviews mail ballots flagged for various reasons and paper provisional ballots cast at polling places. The election bureau is still compiling an estimate of the number of provisional ballots, which must be addressed during adjudication to ensure those voters did not also cast a mail ballot and that everything is in order. Adjudication starts Friday and will continue next week.

The county’s unofficial results will be updated online as the board accepts ballots.

For comparison, county turnout was 70% in the 2020 presidential general election, when 154,134 of the county’s 220,963 registered voters cast ballots, archives show.

The other presidential turnouts based on total registrations at those times: 2016, 67% (137,549 votes cast); 2012, 65% (126,326 votes cast); and 2008, 73.5% (138,076 votes cast).

119th District

Williams said Wednesday she was “shocked” during mail ballot processing when a worker pointed out the presence of a ballot with 119th Legislative District state representative candidate Alec Ryncavage’s name misspelled because ballots with that error were supposed to remain segregated in secure storage for future review.

The county issued new ballots to approximately 7,000 mail ballot voters in that district, with the voting system vendor accepting responsibility for the misspelling.

Because the corrected ballots had marks distinguishing them from the original ones, processers were able to extract the originals from the pool and only tallied the correct ballots in the unofficial election results. By the time the problem was detected, Williams estimated hundreds of original ballots already were separated from the outer envelopes that identify the voters who cast them — a step required to preserve voter confidentiality.

Following past practice, the board had planned to consider accepting original 119th District ballots if the voters did not return a new one or cast a provisional ballot at the polls. However, this may be impossible for those already opened. Even if the board identifies which voters submitted only the original ballot based on information from the outer mailing envelopes, there may be no way to trace which ballot in the pile belonged to them.

Williams said she has presented a series of questions that must be answered about the situation for transparency.

County Manager Romilda Crocamo said Wednesday the administration is still compiling information on the matter, but she said her understanding is that a worker mistakenly transported segregated ballots to the processing room not realizing they must be handled differently than the others.

Mail ballots inside the secure election bureau room on the second floor at Penn Place are kept in clear plastic storage containers and labeled for delivery to the third-floor processing room, Crocamo said. Going forward, an option could be colored bins and enhanced bin labeling for segregated ballots so their status is clear, she said.

“We need to have clear and distinct identification for segregated ballots so all workers retrieving ballots for the board — including those not involved in segregated ballots in the past — have a clear understanding they are not to be processed,” Crocamo said.

The current bin/label system had been used without incident to keep ballots segregated in multiple elections, and this was the first time a misidentification occurred, Crocamo said.

“We’ve done it in the past, and we’ve done so successfully. But even though something has worked in the past, that does not mean we should stop reviewing and refining, and that’s what we’re going to do,” Crocamo said.

While stressing the matter must be seriously addressed, Crocamo said it is fortunate for the county the number of impacted ballots is not sizeable enough to be a determining factor in any races on the ballot, based on the unofficial vote gaps between the winners and their competitors.

Reach Jennifer Learn-Andes at 570-991-6388 or on Twitter @TLJenLearnAndes.