Seven steps to avoid a voting mess in 2020

• 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.

 Ed Mahon / PA Post

Bags for ballots sit in the York County elections office on Nov. 6, 2019.

A SE-SW Pa. divide, and absentee voting from space

Ed Mahon / PA Post

Bags for ballots sit in the York County elections office on Nov. 6, 2019. (Ed Mahon / PA Post)

• Tuesday’s municipal election was unusually eventful as counties throughout the state grappled with voting machine problems. Ed Mahon and I pulled together seven steps that elections officials could consider to improve the process ahead of the 2020 primary and general elections. Read it here.

• Schuylkill County’s been voting on the same touchscreen, direct-recording electronic machines for about 13 years and won’t have new ones in place until next spring. But the old voting machines caused issues there on Election Day, as detailed in this report from the Republican Herald. The gist: poll workers and county officials couldn’t get totals off one device where about 160 ballots were cast. The AccuVote TSX doesn’t produce paper ballot receipts, so a recount wasn’t an option. After the ES&S tech on site for Election Day couldn’t figure it out, Schuylkill officials sent the machine to company headquarters in Omaha, Election Bureau Director Frannie Brennan told us. Brennan noted that it was Diebold Election Systems that actually manufactured the AccuVote machines; the county had to choose a different support vendor after Diebold sold off its elections division over a decade ago amid controversies, including a DOJ investigation.

• Democrats last controlled Delaware and Chester county government during the Civil War; in Bucks, it’s been a few decades. But in all three counties, multiple offices flipped back to Dems on Tuesday. This analysis from Marc Levy of the Associated Press puts the results in full perspective.

• As well as Democrats did in the southeast corner of the state, the party lost ground in the southwest. Four counties — Armstrong, Greene, Washington and Westmoreland — all saw Republican victories in races for county offices. As PoliticsPA’s John Cole notes, these counties “have been trending red for years.”

• ICYMI: Rookie astronaut Andrew Morgan voted absentee in Lawrence County from the International Space Station after officials made some accommodations, including setting up a special electronic ballot that Morgan could cast securely and anonymously. The New Castle News has all the details.

Best of the rest

Emma Lee / WHYY

A sign on Stagecoach Road in Palmerton, Pennsylvania, shows local opposition to the PennEast pipeline. (Emma Lee/WHYY)

• An appeals court ruling seems to be another setback for PennEast in its quest to complete its $1 billion pipeline project. One option: try to get the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the case. Another is re-routing the pipeline’s path around public and/or preserved properties. NJ Spotlight’s Tom Johnson has more for StateImpact Pennsylvania here.

• The wake of a 2018 U.S. Supreme Court hearing continues to rock public sector unions, and on Thursday another wave crashed in Pennsylvania. A group of state employees announced they are suing one of the biggest unions — AFSCME — to force repayment of union dues they were required to contribute over the years. Last year, the nation’s highest court ruled that public workers can’t be forced to join (and pay dues to) unions like AFSCME.  Capitol Bureau Chief Katie Meyer has a story about the lawsuit.

• Katie also reported on concerns by some state lawmakers about the Pa. Liquor Control Board’s record profits. Read that story here.

• A Bucknell University poll sought to gauge public opinion about whether colleges should pay athletes. It found mixed results as far as where people stand — and how much they appear to care about the issue. Rachel McDevitt breaks down results in this story.