Morris Romig drops off his voter mail-in ballot application at the Voter Registration office in the Lehigh County Government Center in Allentown, PA., on Tuesday, September 15, 2020. Romig said he’s worried about fraud and doesn’t know who to believe. He said he’s going to vote one way or another in this election.
Hannah Yoon / NPR
Hannah Yoon / NPR
Morris Romig drops off his voter mail-in ballot application at the Voter Registration office in the Lehigh County Government Center in Allentown, PA., on Tuesday, September 15, 2020. Romig said he’s worried about fraud and doesn’t know who to believe. He said he’s going to vote one way or another in this election.
(Pittsburgh) — Voter registration in Pennsylvania has likely set records, election officials said Wednesday, and requests for mail-in ballots ahead of the general election have already exceeded total mail-in voting in the primary. The state also announced plans to counteract efforts to claim victory on Election Night before the mail-in ballots are counted.
“We think that our total voter registration may be at an all-time high,” said Secretary of the Commonwealth Kathy Boockvar in an update with the press Wednesday.
As of Wednesday, 9,908,777 people are registered to vote in Pennsylvania: 4,175,532 Democrats, 3,459,627 Republicans, and 875,191 of other parties or no affiliation. Boockvar said nearly 2.5 million people have already requested mail-in ballots, the overwhelming majority of those requests coming from Democrats. By Wednesday, 1,628,401 Democrats had requested ballots, compared with 600,487 Republicans and 259,480 voters of other parties.
“Just as a reminder, we had nearly 1.5 million vote in the primary by mail,” Boockvar said. “So we already have a million more applications than those that voted by mail in the primary.”
Results of the Nov. 3 election in Pennsylvania, and across the country, likely won’t be known for days.
The counting of ballots continues after election night most years. This year’s expected surge in mailed ballots means election offices will need extra time to tally all the votes.
As that occurs, some candidates may call for the counting to end and for themselves to be declared the winner. However, winners will be decided when all the votes are counted — that’s the American election system at work.
WITF’s journalists will cover that process, and WITF will rely on The Associated Press to call races for the winner based on the AP’s rigorous, time-tested method.
While voters could request mail-in ballots months before the November election, counties can only begin mailing out ballots 50 days before the election. Officials often have to wait longer for court challenges to be resolved before ballots can be printed.
Boockvar assured voters who are waiting on their mail-in ballots that they should receive them soon. She said 96 percent of the 2.5 million applications received have been approved and processed, and those ballots are either “already in the mail or about to be mailed.”
Boockvar also gave updates on the many election-related legal challenges in Pennsylvania.
In one such case, the Department of State asked the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to extend the deadline for mail-in ballots postmarked on or before November 3 by three days. Boockvar said the state has filed a King’s Bench petition – an unusual move which asks the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to weigh in on any pending court case, or even address issues not in the courts but which are of “immediate public importance.”
An election worker sorts vote-by-mail ballots for the presidential primary in Washington on March 10.
The department also filed a King’s Bench petition asking the state’s highest court for a ruling that ballots can’t be rejected over signatures that have varied over time.
Boockvar also announced that the department is working on a new website that will take some of the guesswork out of the longer ballot-counting process officials expect will take place on Election Night and in the days after.
There are no requirements about when counties must begin tallying mail ballots on Election Day, and some won’t begin doing so until the day after the election. But because Republicans prefer voting in person and Democrats prefer voting by mail this year, many expect initial results to favor Republicans. The new website will provide detailed, county-by-county breakdowns, prompting fears that the GOP may declare victory while the results are still in doubt.
Boockvar said the state will provide information to make clear how much farther the counting process has to go. “You’ll be able to track what’s left on the mail-in and absentee front parallel to seeing what’s coming in on the in-person,” she said.
The deadline to register to vote is Oct. 19, and the deadline to request a mail-in ballot is Oct. 27. Even say, officials say voters should request and return their ballots as soon as possible.
A collection of interviews, photos, and music videos, featuring local musicians who have stopped by the WITF performance studio to share a little discussion and sound. Produced by WITF’s Joe Ulrich.
