FILE - A person drops off a mail-in ballot at an election ballot return box in Willow Grove, Pa., Oct. 25, 2021. Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are crucial swing states that allow mail-in ballots but give local election offices very little if any time before Election Day to process them. Election workers’ inability to check signatures, addresses and get the mailed ballots ready for counting ahead of time means many of the those ballots may not be counted on Election Day
Allegheny County posts lists of voters whose mail-in ballots are at risk, offers remedy
One option for voters whose declaration envelopes include improper or missing dates is to vote provisionally at their regular polling place on Tuesday.
Nearly three decades after leaving home for college, Chris Potter now lives four miles from the house he grew up in -- a testament either to the charm of the South Hills or to a simple lack of ambition. In the intervening years, Potter held a variety of jobs, including asbestos abatement engineer and ice-cream truck driver. He has also worked for a number of local media outlets, only some of which then went out of business. After serving as the editor of Pittsburgh City Paper for a decade, he covered politics and government at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. He has won some awards during the course of his quarter-century journalistic career, but then even a blind squirrel sometimes digs up an acorn.
Matt Rourke / AP Photo
FILE - A person drops off a mail-in ballot at an election ballot return box in Willow Grove, Pa., Oct. 25, 2021. Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are crucial swing states that allow mail-in ballots but give local election offices very little if any time before Election Day to process them. Election workers’ inability to check signatures, addresses and get the mailed ballots ready for counting ahead of time means many of the those ballots may not be counted on Election Day
If you voted by mail in Tuesday’s General Election, you might want to make sure your name doesn’t appear on either of two lists the county has posted of voters whose ballots lack a proper date — or any date at all.
Here’s a searchable database of the lists, created by WESA’s Oliver Morrison:
The lists were posted Sunday evening, in the wake of a state Supreme Court decision this weekend governing the disposition of ballots enclosed inside “declaration envelopes” without the proper date. If your name is among the more than 1,000 that appear on either list, you are in danger of not having your vote counted. But you still have options to remedy the situation if you act quickly.
One option for voters whose declaration envelopes include improper or missing dates is to vote provisionally at their regular polling place on Tuesday. Those voters will be given a provisional ballot, which they will need to return to poll workers rather than it being scanned. Such votes are set aside until the county’s Return Board can verify the legitimacy of the ballot, a process that will not begin for several days after Election Day itself.
Alternatively, voters can “cure” the ballot by visiting the third floor of the County Office Building Downtown (542 Forbes Avenue) on Monday between 8:30 a.m. and 4:30 p.m. or on Tuesday during the voting hours of 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. Voters will be required to present a photo ID in order to cure the ballot.
Those who are unable to travel to the County Office Building or their polling place can designate a third party to cure the ballot for them by using a form. The designee must present the signed form and bring their own photo ID to present to election workers.
The newly posted lists reflect Allegheny County’s last-ditch efforts to assure all votes are counted after a decision by the state Supreme Court not to accept ballots that aren’t properly dated — even if the ballots arrive on or before Election Day. The court didn’t provide guidance about what dates would be acceptable until Saturday, by which point the county said in a statement, “There is not opportunity to notify impacted voters by letter.”
By Sunday night, efforts were already underway to reach out to voters whose ballots were at risk. Darrin Kelly, the region’s top labor leader, said AFL-CIO staff were already searching for union members who might be on the list.
Sam Hens-Greco, who chairs the Allegheny County Democratic Committee, said efforts to connect with voters are “already in process. When we got notification about this, I said, ‘We’re going to be robocalling and texting those folks.’” County Republicans also plan to engage in notification efforts.
Matt Slocum / AP Photo
Chester County, Pa. election workers process mail-in and absentee ballots at West Chester University, Wednesday, Nov. 4, 2020, in West Chester.
Litigation over the dating of envelopes goes back to the 2020 election, when the state Supreme Court agreed to accept ballots that arrived on time even without dates, despite a date requirement provided for in Act 77, the state law that allowed for the expansion of mail-in voting. Supporters of the date requirement are mostly Republican and say it is necessary to demonstrate potentially fraudulent voting. But others say the requirement is effectively meaningless if the vote arrives at county election offices by the time of the election.
Ballots with date problems have been kept segregated from other ballots.
As of Sunday evening, some 385 voters had sent in ballots with no date on their declaration envelope, while 618 had sent in ballots with a date that fell outside the range the court deemed acceptable. More such ballots could arrive by Tuesday.
