Washington County Elections Board unanimous in tackling challenged provisional ballots
Barbara S. Miller/Observer-Reporter
Washington County Elections Director Melanie Ostrander, center, arrived at Thursday’s election board meeting with a cartload of provisional ballots.
Washington County Elections Director Melanie Ostrander, left, conveys information about provisional ballots to election board Chairman Diana Irey Vaughan and colleague Larry Maggi. Commissioner Nick Sherman participated via Zoom teleconference.
Election board Chairman Diana Irey Vaughan confers with Brian Kennedy, left, and Charlie Demi. "We decided to count every vote," Irey Vaughan, a Republican, told the Democrats.
David Kresh, a member of the Washington County Election Review Committee and the post-election canvass board, watched the wheels of government turn Thursday morning, and he wished someone could apply some axle grease.
The county commissioners, acting in their capacity as an election board, evaluated hundreds of provisional ballots cast Nov. 3.
About 520 of the 1,862 provisional ballots had been challenged, mostly for lacking written information from either a poll worker, voter, or both, on an outer envelope.
Kresh came away with one recommendation: simplify the process.
There was no public comment offered during the 50-minute meeting at Courthouse Square, which drew about two dozen attendees, but Kresh approached commission and election board Chairman Diana Irey Vaughan afterward to discuss the complexities of casting a provisional ballot.
“There’s no reason, in my opinion, to have any information on that ballot (envelope) that’s not necessary,” Kresh said. “And if it is optional, it should be clearly labeled optional.”
If the state Legislature hadn’t made the provisional voting process complicated, “This meeting would have been pretty much unneeded,” Kresh said.
“If it’s just optional, don’t ask them for it and, if you have problems with the amount of time it takes to get elections done, because we have huge crowds voting in person, why do you want to give the voters and the election officers more stuff to fill in when it’s not required and won’t matter anyway?”
During the course of the 50-minute meeting, Melanie Ostrander, Washington County elections director, presented a myriad of categories explaining why information on forms accompanying provisional ballots had been challenged as legally insufficient.
Time after time, Irey Vaughan asked county solicitor Jana Grimm for a legal opinion on whether each category of ballot should be rejected because it contained what’s known as a “fatal flaw.”
Grimm repeatedly replied that, according to the state election code, this was not a fatal error which would result in a provisional ballot going into storage unopened and uncounted.
Irey Vaughan, commission Vice Chairman Larry Maggi and Commissioner Nick Sherman, who participated by Zoom teleconference, unanimously decided that the vast majority of the categories of provisional ballots should be counted, although not all were eligible for what’s known as a “full count.”
Some the examples of the categories were: information not completed in various sections of a form by either a voter, poll worker, or both; an incomplete address; a ballot cast by an inactive, but still registered voter; a voter going to the wrong precinct outside the legislative district of residence; a voter writing the address of a polling location instead of a home address; differences in a voter’s signature and the one on file with the elections office; and a voter printing a full name but not including a last name in the signature line.
What are known as “naked cured ballots” were another matter.
Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar issued an administrative order on election eve that voters who had mailed or dropped off ballots lacking a secrecy envelope could “cure” this fatal flaw by casting a provisional ballot at a polling place. Nineteen Washington County voters took advantage of this late development.
The campaign of President Donald Trump is contesting in court this so-called curing of naked ballots. Also in limbo is whether mailed ballots postmarked by Election Day but received by elections offices Nov. 4-6 should be part of a final count.
The Pennsylvania Department of State website on Thursday showed former vice president Joe Biden winning with 3,389,081 votes to Trump’s 3,335,370.
Trump carried Washington County with 60.8% of the vote to Biden’s 38.1%.
Regardless of the Washington County Election Board’s action, none of the ballots considered Thursday morning will be counted until a deadline to appeal the board’s decision to Washington County Court expires Monday. Initiation of litigation would likely push a count past Nov. 17.
Pennsylvania law calls for votes to be certified by Monday, Nov. 23.
Among those filing local challenges were the Republican National Committee, the Trump campaign and the Pennsylvania Democratic Committee. Lawyers for both parties were present Thursday.
Provisional ballots came into being in the United States during the aftermath of the hotly contested presidential election of 2000. Then-vice president Al Gore won the national popular vote, but Florida gave George W. Bush the Electoral College vote, and the dispute wasn’t decided until Dec. 13 of that year.