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Mail-in, provisional ballots cause some disconnect in Lebanon County

Under federal law, voters are entitled to receive provisional ballots.

  • Alanna Elder/WITF
A voter cast her mail-in ballot at in a drop box in West Chester, Pa., prior to the primary election, Thursday, May 28, 2020.

 Matt Rourke / Associated Press

A voter cast her mail-in ballot at in a drop box in West Chester, Pa., prior to the primary election, Thursday, May 28, 2020.

(Lebanon) — Election judges in some precincts of Lebanon County declined to give provisional ballots to voters who had already received ballots in the mail, contrary to what is supposed to happen according to state election law.

Victor DePicciotto spent the day at a firehouse in the city of Lebanon, serving as the judge of elections for the county’s fifth-middle ward. He said he was supposed to call the county elections office if someone’s name appeared in the voter rolls next to the words “mail-in” and “issue provisional.”

The office, he said, told him to send one voter to the courthouse to drop off his mail-in ballot instead.

Another voter said she had destroyed her mail-in ballot. DePicciotto said she was not allowed to vote. A report in Palmyra described poll workers sending voters to the courthouse instead of providing provisional ballots.

“The instructions were very clear that if they received a mail-in ballot, they could not be issued a provisional ballot,” DiPicciotto said.

Under federal law, voters are entitled to receive provisional ballots. State law determines the circumstances under which those ballots are available. In Pennsylvania, voters who applied for mail-in ballots and didn’t receive them, should also be able to vote provisionally in person, according to state election law.

The election code now states, “An elector who appears to vote on election day having requested an absentee ballot or mail-in ballot and who is not shown on the district register as having voted an absentee ballot or mail-in ballot shall be permitted to cast a provisional ballot.”

County election boards review the ballots, to make sure no one is double-voting, for example, before they can be counted.

“It’s a whole way we prevent the word that everybody loves to say, which is fraud,” Lebanon County Elections Director Michael Anderson said.

He said the office fielded “non-stop” calls throughout the day from election judges asking what to do with voters who had mail-in ballots but changed their minds about voting by mail.

“Really for me, yes, the law allows for that, but really they should be voting the ballot they received and the provisionals should be for those individuals that didn’t receive their ballot,” he said.

Anderson said the county did not instruct judges to deny provisional ballots to voters that had received materials to vote by mail. Instead, he said it was “a matter of perception,” and that this year’s election process was new for voters as well as election personnel.

“I can’t say maybe one or two judges didn’t say, no, you need to take that to the municipal building to be voted,” Anderson said. “That’s not necessarily wrong. But you’re right that by law if they present themselves as a voter and they want to vote there, they can.”

He said judges and poll workers this year had less training than usual. In light of COVID-19, the county had to convey information it would normally share in person using only “mail” and “notes.”

He also suggested the buffer between the deadline for ballot applications and the election should be longer in the future, to give offices more time to send ballots and voters more time to return them.

One of Anderson’s priorities is to educate voters about the mail-in process, including urging them to use their mail-in ballots if they request them. But the resistance to provisional ballots may have caused problems for voters and underscores how they are not the only ones learning.

This is not the first time in recent years that the county has struggled to provide provisional ballots to voters. A similar issue came up in 2016, when PA Post reported some voters with “registration issues” were turned away instead of being allowed to vote provisionally.

 

Alanna is part of the Report for America program — a national service effort that places journalists in newsrooms across the country to report on under-covered topics and communities.

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