Will counties finally get paid for voting upgrades?

• Emily Previti/PA Post
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  Emily is a reporter for WITF who’s been covering voting and elections since July 2019 as part of her former role with statehouse accountability news organization PA Post. She was the senior reporter for statewide public media collaboration Keystone Crossroads. Previously, she covered city hall for PennLive/The Patriot-News (Harrisburg, Pa.), was a watchdog and city hall reporter at The Press of Atlantic City and reported for the Northwest Herald. She is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania.
  
  See other articles by Emily Previti for WITF.

 Emily Previti/PA Post

Fulton County Director of Election & Voter Registration Karen M. Hann-McFadden, left, and poll workers Dorothy Hixon and Corrie Gearhart during a training session Oct. 16 in McConnellsburg.

Roundup of election and voting news

Emily Previti/PA Post

Fulton County Director of Election & Voter Registration Karen M. Hann-McFadden, left, and poll workers Dorothy Hixon and Corrie Gearhart during a training session Oct. 16 in McConnellsburg. (Emily Previti / PA Post)

• Northumberland County officials say the costs to upgrade their voting system could be up to $1 million, according to this story from The Daily Item’s Justin Strawser. That’s about mid-range, according to this study from Pitt’s Institute for Cyber Law, Policy and Security.

• Meanwhile, state lawmakers might finally get a firm plan in place for finding money to partially reimburse counties for their costs to acquire the new systems. Legislators are expected to amend SB421 early next week to approve bonding for $90 million via the Pennsylvania Economic Development Financing Authority. Counties would get reimbursed through the Department of State. PEDFA normally can’t give money to state agencies, but House Republicans say spelling out specific deals in statute makes it OK.

• As for federal funding: The Hill reports that Republican senators blocked a measure that would’ve made $1 billion in election security funding available for states and required paper backups of ballots. Apparently, it’s Tennessee GOP Sen. Marsha Blackburn who held up the Democratic-backed legislation. Full story is here.

• Also, I applied yesterday for an absentee ballot via DoS’s new online system since I’m leaving before Nov. 5 for election coverage on the other side of the state. DoS sent a confirmation email within about 15 minutes and another a couple hours later alerting me that the county election office had received the application. My ballot should arrive with Saturday’s mail, I’m told.

• Pa.’s absentee ballot process prompted a lawsuit by the ACLU that’s still unresolved. Legal Director Vic Walczyk tells me the current version of SB421 resolves the issues in the group’s complaint, though. Get background on the case by listening to this State of the State episode.

Best of the rest

Brett Sholtis / Transforming Health

Supporters of House Bill 1900 wore gold shirts at a rally in the state Capitol Wed., Oct. 23, 2019. They want the state to license applied behavior analysis as a medical profession so that insurance will cover it. (Brett Sholtis / WITF)

• Pennsylvania has a shortage of applied behavioral analysts, experts whose interventions are especially effective for children with autism, as well as those grappling with addiction and PTSD. The commonwealth is among the minority of states without a specific license for the specialty. That makes it nearly impossible  — cumbersome, at best — for those therapists to recoup fees from insurers. More than 100 state lawmakers are backing a bill that would fix the problem. Transforming Health’s Brett Sholtis has this story out of a rally in support of the measure at the statehouse.

• Will Coraopolis-based Dick’s Sporting Goods CEO Ed Stack mount a third-party presidential campaign? Stack’s people downplayed the prospect in this Politico story about a focus group with more test messaging dedicated to him than any other candidate. Getting particular emphasis, a participant told Politico, was the chain’s decision to stop telling AR-15 semi-automatic rifles. The company pulled the weapons from shelves in the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting back in 2012, but didn’t publicize the move at the time, according to this Time.com report from a few weeks ago when Stack confirmed the company destroyed $5 million worth of related inventory.

• PennDOT says it won’t provide drivers license information that could indicate citizenship to the U.S. Census Bureau. Thirteen states have denied the bureau’s request, made after the U.S. Supreme Court blocked a citizenship question from the 2020 Census, the Associated Press reports.