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Election Review Board recommends ramping up personnel handling mail-in ballots

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Washington County Election Review Committee Chairman David Ball presented a 26-page report Wednesday to two of three commissioners concerning potential improvements to be implemented before the Nov. 3 general election.

Ball’s recommendation: pay to triple the number of people to 60 to handle a potential avalanche of mail-in ballots and purchase more scanning capability that will count paper ballots more efficiently than what occurred during the June 2 primary.

He also recommended providing Elections Director Melanie Ostrander with an assistant for Election Day to manage the mail-in ballot-counting operation for the Nov. 3 election.

No cost estimates were included in the report.

Ball conjectured there could be as many as 70,000 absentee and mail-in ballots in the autumn, an increase from the spring when there were 27,000 applications and 22,000 voted ballots.

When the committee met in late February before the novel coronavirus pandemic struck, Ball had anticipated about 35,000 absentee and mail-in ballots for the general election, but concerns about voting in person vastly ramped up projections.

Actual counting of mail-in ballots, by state law, can’t begin until 7 a.m. on Election Day. Ball would like to see the outermost envelopes removed beforehand to speed the process, with the actual ballots inside individual security envelopes remaining under lock and key.

He also wants to see the public meeting room on the ground floor of the Courthouse Square office building – where he delivered the report Wednesday – turned into “elections central” because it’s more spacious than the elections office suite one floor above.

He expressed concern about “chain of custody” as ballots are moved from place to place, but Commissioner Nick Sherman said surveillance is in use, and commission Chairman Diana Irey Vaughan noted sheriff’s deputies accompany people handling elections materials.

Ball wants to see those who will be counting mail-in ballots to do a “walk-through” on the Monday before Election Day.

“Despite the incredible obstacles posed by the coronavirus pandemic, almost all of the recommendations were successfully implemented,” wrote Ball, who is vice chairman of the Washington County Republican Party.

“Areas of fall-down, and they were definitely front and center, were the time it took to count mail-in, absentee and provisional ballots and the absolute failure of the results reporting system.”

Although the public regards the reporting of vote totals as the duty of the elections office because that’s where results are displayed on the internet, placing the information on the county website on election night is actually the function of the county’s Information Technology Department and the county’s vendor, Election Systems & Software of Omaha, Neb.

When cumulative totals are reported and updated, Washington County notes the number of 180 total precincts tabulated throughout the night, but Ball wants information disseminated on the number of votes counted along with the number of ballots yet to be processed.

At each polling place, Ball wants to see a separate area set up to handle the casting of provisional ballots, which are used if a voter comes to the wrong polling place, doesn’t show up on the roll of registered voters, or a host of other scenarios. The validity of provisional ballots begins to be evaluated the Friday after an election.

Setting up a table for provisional voting via paper ballot would streamline the process by not having to hold up others who may be waiting in line.

The report also suggested appointing an “election liaison” to be in charge of polling places within a school district. There are 15 school districts in Washington County, counting Brownsville Area in Fayette County that extends to Washington County’s West Brownsville Borough.

“If you’ve never worked a poll, you probably don’t know how important poll workers are in making this election go well,” Ball said.

He also wants to see a post-election audit conducted to make sure electronically recorded totals match those on each voting machine’s paper trail, in use in Washington County for the first time during the June 2 primary.

“Good legislation can come out of this,” Sherman said as the meeting concluded, and several election-related issues should be brought to the attention of the County Commissioners Association of Pennsylvania, which lobbies on behalf of counties.

“I don’t know how Melanie pulled it off,” said committee member David Kresh, “because she had a perfect storm of, ‘Let’s try new voting machines in the middle of a pandemic.’ Every day you had something new to deal with.”

“And new legislation,” another committee member chimed in.

Absent committee members Wednesday were Larry Mauro and Eric Sivavec. Representing Commission Vice Chairman Larry Maggi at the meeting was his administrative assistant, Randi Ross Marodi.

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