Two weeks until deadline to apply for Pa. mail-in ballot

Plus: Opposition to Gov. Wolf's shutdown order grows in "red" counties

• 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.
  
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• Russ Walker
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  Russ Walker joined PA Post in 2019 as executive editor. He previously worked at KING 5 News, the NBC-affiliated TV station serving Seattle and Western Washington. At KING, Russ oversaw the award-winning investigative unit and managed the newsroom’s daily operations. His background includes stints as an editor for POLITICO, washingtonpost.com, FreedomChannel.com, American Health Line and U.N. Wire. He is a graduate of Vanderbilt University. Russ and his wife, journalist and cookbook author Kim O’Donnel, live in Lancaster.

A Democratic primary mail-in ballot sent to a Lancaster County voter ahead of the June 2, 2020, primary.

A Democratic primary mail-in ballot sent to a Lancaster County voter ahead of the June 2, 2020, primary.

By the middle of last week, Pennsylvania counties said they had processed more than 900,000* absentee and mail-in voter applications in advance of the June 2 primary.

It’s important to note a couple things about that number:

• It’s going to get much bigger. The Pa. Department of State released the county-level mailed ballot request data Wednesday morning and by the end of the same day, Philadelphia had processed another 3,000 or so applications, according to city records.

• We’re two weeks away from the May 26 deadline for mailed ballot applications. The last-minute rush will likely be significant, election directors say, because of the coronavirus — as state leaders tout the mail-in option and many voters don’t need much convincing to avoid public places during the pandemic.

That said, here are some initial takeaways from these preliminary numbers:

• Allegheny County reported the highest number of applications received — more than 130,000. Next were Philadelphia and Montgomery (right around 85,000 each). The other Philly collar counties and Lancaster round out the top of the list, each with between 35,000 and 55,000 requests each. The counties with the lowest number of requests, with fewer than 500 each, are Forest, Sullivan and Cameron counties.

• Despite its low total number of requests, Cameron County actually ended up posting the highest percentage of registered voters applying for mail-in ballots, a product of the county’s small population (just under 4,500 in 2018, according to the Census Bureau). Slightly more than 15 percent of Cameron’s voters applied.

• Trailing Cameron in the percentage of voters seeking mail-in ballots are Montgomery, Chester, Allegheny and Susquehanna counties — all just under 15 percent. The statewide average is 10.5 percent. Northumberland is lowest by this measure, at 2.3 percent.

• About 8 percent of Philadelphia voters have applied for an absentee or mail-in ballot so far. It ranks 58th of 67 counties for this metric. That could have major implications for in-person voting in the city.

If you haven’t applied for a mail-in ballot yet, you can do that by going to VotesPA.com or call 877-VOTES-PA to request that an application be sent to you.

For readers who want to vote in person, be sure you check with your local county elections office to make sure your regular polling place hasn’t been moved. To help counties deal with facility access issues, the state is allowing them to consolidate precincts, essentially creating voting centers. In Allegheny County, for example, the 1,300 regular polling places are being condensed into between 200 and 300.

Over in Delaware County, officials finalized their poll consolidation plan earlier this week.

For in-person voting, the county will continue with its plan to use hand-marked ballots; however, they won’t be scanned by each voter as they’re cast. Instead, voters will deposit them into secure boxes, and election workers will scan them at the central office at the end of the night, according to Commissioner Christine Reuther.

Delaware is one of 20 or so counties that hasn’t launched its new voting machines yet. Some (including Dauphin and Columbia counties) had completed at least one round of poll worker training prior to the onset of business closure and social distancing directives; however, Delaware wasn’t among them, Reuther said.

Public school buildings dominate the new list of voting locations in Delaware County, and that’s likely to be the case in nearly every county where consolidation is needed. Why? Under state law, school districts must make their facilities available as polling places, Gov. Tom Wolf explained earlier this week.

Here are some election headlines from around the state:

• Reading Eagle: Berks County election board votes to increase poll worker pay

• PennLive: New polling locations announced in Dauphin County for Pa. primary due to COVID-19

• The Philadelphia Inquirer: Pennsylvania allows big reduction in poll workers for 2020 primary election to help counties during pandemic

• The Morning Call: Vote by mail in Pennsylvania? Reaction from ‘if I can go to the grocery store, I can go vote’ to ‘stay safe and stay home’

• Post-Gazette: GOP groups, nonprofits in fight over mail-in ballot deadline for Pa. primary, general election

• BillyPenn: Procrastinator’s Guide to the 2020 primary election in Philly

• Stateline: Postal Service’s Struggles Could Hurt Mail-In Election

• USA Today: Fact check: Lawyer in Pa. election suit is not ‘Hillary Clinton’s lawyer’

• Erie Times-News editorial: Vote safely, cast ballot by mail

*Note about the data cited above: You might recall Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar announcing Monday that more than 980,000 mailed ballots had been submitted statewide. That figure, however, includes duplicates and applications not yet verified by counties, according to department spokeswoman Wanda Murren.

Coronavirus rebellion

Kimberly Paynter / WHYY

About a dozen cars, honking horns, descending on City Hall in Philadelphia Friday, May 8 to protest against shutdown orders because of the coronavirus pandemic. (Kimberly Paynter / WHYY)

By PA Post editor Russ Walker:

We enter the week of May 11 with some pretty big questions, but related to Gov. Wolf and his handling of the pandemic.

1. How many counties left out of the May 8 and May 15 “yellow” phase reopenings will pursue their own course at the end of this week?

2. What, if anything, will Gov. Wolf do to enforce his shutdown order in the remaining “red” phase counties?

3. Do the business owners and everyone else living in red counties line up behind local leaders to reopen their economies? Or do they stay home?

4. Will the legislature go to court to force the Wolf administration to release all the information it wants regarding the business waiver program?

5. Will Gov. Wolf do the right thing and release that information unilaterally?

How these questions are answered will be fascinating to watch. Of course, the biggest wild card is the coronavirus itself. Will the number of positive cases continue grow by 1,000 or so every day? Is that enough to keep the state’s largest city and surrounding counties locked down beyond May 22 or May 29?

Some additional reading:

• LNP: Lancaster County plans to head into yellow reopening phase, officials tell Wolf

• York Daily Record: ‘We got Wolf on the ropes’ Rep. Mike Jones tells a crowd of 150+ maskless people in Wisehaven

• Middletown Press & Journal: Dauphin Co. DA Chardo: ‘Extraordinary circumstances’ only reason to prosecute violations of Gov. Wolf’s closure order

• Bucks County Courier Times: Bucks requests Gov. Tom Wolf provide county with reopening date

• Delaware County Daily Times: ‘Open up’ protest staged outside Media barber shop

• PennLive: Williams Grove Flea Market (in Cumberland County) reopens despite coronavirus restrictions: ‘It’s my only source of income’

• York Daily Record: Round the Clock Diner opens for dine-in service against Wolf’s order