Aug 24, 2015 4 min read

Washington County’s assistant director of elections, having just returned from a Gettysburg confab of those in similar positions, would like to see counties have more autonomy when it comes to the twice-yearly task of conducting polling.

Wes Parry said he realizes this would require changing the Pennsylvania Election Code, adopted in 1937, but it would save “money, manpower and machines,” as in voting machines. From his desk in the Courthouse Square office building, he produced a chart that shows the number of registered voters in each precinct.

Turnout for the primary in May hovered just above 20 percent. For the smallest precincts, that’s not many voters casting ballots.

Said Parry, “I am sending manpower, machines and money to precincts for 10 people?”

Boroughs and townships are required to have at least one polling place, and all of the six smallest municipalities, voter-wise, are boroughs, or, in the case of Centerville 5, part of a borough.

At the opposite end of the spectrum are large, suburban residential areas that exceed the election code’s maximum of 1,200 registered voters. “You know where all the growth is,” Parry said. “Where are we to put a polling place unless we take over somebody’s basement?”

Washington County just went to court last year to reduce the number of precincts by eight to 176, and, under the current law, Parry foresees having to again petition to have more precincts created in North Strabane and Cecil townships.

Rather than dividing the county into nearly 200 precincts, Parry said he’d prefer to see each school district declare election day a holiday and have people go to at least 15 voting centers at schools where 25 voting machines and 25 electronic poll books could be deployed to get people in and out quickly. He’d also like the state to do away with its requirement that people vote exclusively where they live, which would alleviate an early-morning and after-work crush of voters. Courthouse and Courthouse Square employees could head to, for example, Washington High School during lunch hour and cast a ballot that could be encoded for their specific municipality or precinct.

(Washington County has 14 school districts, but West Brownsville Borough is part of the Brownsville Area School District in Fayette County.) Parry said he prefers that schools or major municipal buildings be used as polling places because they have ample parking and are accessible to the disabled.

A system like this might not work for densely populated parts of Philadelphia or Pittsburgh, but Parry said there was a consensus at the Gettysburg meeting to allow each county to have the flexibility to institute its own system. Some elections officials with whom Parry spoke said they’d like to see their counties allow total mail-in balloting rather than require people to go to polling places.

One of the reasons voting is so localized is to attempt to prevent a type of voter fraud involving impersonation of a registered voter. But people just don’t know others in the community the way they once did, Parry said.

“The threshing party, the wool pool and the quilting bee aren’t part of this era,” he said, when people may know Facebook friends better than they know their next-door neighbors.

Parry said he also realizes that Washington County will, in the next few years, have to replace both the hardware and software of its touch-screen electronic voting machines, purchased in 2006 for $2.1 million. Of the purchase price, $1.8 million came from a grant from federal taxpayers through the Help America Vote Act, while the remainder came from county taxpayers.

The county has between 750 and 800 voting machines, but it could get by with fewer if it didn’t have to deploy multiple machines to the smallest municipalities. Local election boards require about 1,000 people countywide, a figure Parry said he believes he could halve with a voting-center system, but it would mean doing away with elected judge-of-election and majority and minority inspector positions that don’t require competency in technology or knowledge of the election code.

The County Commissioners Association of Pennsylvania, based in Harrisburg, notes that “Counties … oversee all elections, the basis of our democracy. They keep a registry of voters, make sure election equipment is in good working order and ensure that polling places are accessible to everyone who wants to vote.”

County commissioners also serve as the election board, except for years like 2015, when the office is on the ballot. The court-appointed election board this year in Washington County has as its members three attorneys, Bradley M. Bassi, Kathleen Gustine and William H. Knestrick.

Parry said the first step in any changes to the election code would be to “get the legislators to pay attention to some of this.”