Apr 16, 2020 4 min read

Two of the three commissioners said Wednesday that they, and their wives, plan to vote by mail in the June 2 primary.

Commissioner Larry Maggi and his wife, Mary Jeanne, Democrats, and Commissioner Nick Sherman and his wife, Heather, Republicans, have recently applied under the state’s new no-excuse-needed mail-in balloting law, they said after a teleconference agenda-setting session Wednesday morning.

The Washington County commissioners also comprise the county Elections Board, and Diana Irey Vaughan chairs both.

Allegheny County Executive Rich Fitzgerald earlier this week called for an expansion of the state’s emergency declaration to allow his county to send a ballot to every voter registered there.

As of Wednesday, Allegheny County reported 904 cases of the novel coronavirus, most of them caught from other infected people within the community. Those hospitalized, past or present, numbered 146, and 26 people have died.

“Holding an in-person election in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic would be, in and of itself, a disaster,” Fitzgerald said in a news release, if voters and members of local election boards fear close contact at the polls.

On Wednesday, state Rep. Ed Gainey, a Democrat from Pittsburgh whose district also includes some suburbs, moved to introduce legislation that would provide voters with the option of either voting by mail or in person.

Gainey supports removing the requirement to apply for mail-in ballots, and the automatic issuance of mail-in ballots to all registered voters 60 days before a scheduled election.

“At this date I think it is premature to cancel our in-person election process,” Irey Vaughan wrote in response to an email inquiry Monday.

“As we move closer to Election Day, we should reevaluate where we are in the COVID-19 pandemic, and our available resources of locations and poll workers. Then, based on safety and availability of resources, we can make a better determination of what is in the best interest of county residents and voters.”

She also wrote, “Mail-in ballots have the potential for a greater risk of fraud.”

A notorious 2018 case in the Bladen and Robeson counties of a North Carolina Congressional District led to criminal charges and a do-over election.

Gainey noted, however, that Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah and Washington conduct elections almost entirely by mail.

Sherman echoed Irey Vaughan’s concerns and said by early June, “We’re going to be looking a lot better as a county and as a country.”

Like the Shermans, the Maggis are viewing the mail-in ballots as an experiment within the election process.

“We mailed ours in Monday,” Maggi said.

Pennsylvania added no-excuse mail-in balloting for this year’s primary under legislation Gov. Tom Wolf signed last October.

A Tweet from the Associated Press from Tuesday reported Pennsylvania counties have processed about 283,000 absentee and mail-in ballots for the June 2 primary, and requests from Democrats are three times more common than from Republicans, state elections officials said.

Melanie Ostrander, Washington County elections director, said as of Tuesday, 5,310 applications for mail-in ballots had been filed, both on paper and online. Of these, 1,633 were “traditional” absentee ballot requests from people who will be out of their home areas on the day of the primary. Another category includes requests from members of the military and overseas civilians.

In contrast, during the presidential primary in Pennsylvania 2016, there were just 1,436 absentee ballots cast in Washington County.

May 26 is the last day to apply for an absentee or mail-in ballot in advance of the June 2 primary.

The Pennsylvania Department of State notified Ostrander that a glitch occurred recently when prospective voters who were applying online during a computer system upgrade received multiple confirmations of their requests.

The elections director personally knew of four instances due to inquiries she received, and the Department of State issued apologies to those affected, assuring them they were not victims of “spamming;” nor did the computer system’s actions result in multiple applications.