People fill out mail-in ballots for the 2024 General Election in the United States at a Voters Services satellite office at the Chester County Government Services Center, Friday, Oct. 25, 2024, in West Chester, Pa. (AP Photo/Matt Slocum)
What if there’s a problem at my precinct? How Pa. elections officials prepare for the unexpected.
Millions of voters, thousands of volunteer elections staff, hundreds of computers: small things are bound to go wrong, but backup plans are in place.
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Jordan Wilkie/WITF
People fill out mail-in ballots for the 2024 General Election in the United States at a Voters Services satellite office at the Chester County Government Services Center, Friday, Oct. 25, 2024, in West Chester, Pa. (AP Photo/Matt Slocum)
Tuesday, somewhere between 1-2 million Pennsylvanian voters are expected to travel to their local polling place to cast a ballot. As with every major election day, with over a million voters, thousands of volunteers running polling places across Pennsylvania, and hundreds of voting machines, some mistakes — usually small — are bound to happen.
WITF’s Jordan Wilkie talks with Carter Walker, Votebeat’s Pennsylvania elections reporter, about how elections officials prepare for the unexpected to minimize the impact of disruptions.
Anyone can report a problem with the election process. They can call their county elections office, contact the Department of State, or reach out to a voter hotline run by nonprofits.
This interview was edited for clarity and length.
Jordan, WITF: Elections are, by and large, run well. In the vast majority of elections there aren’t major errors, but things do go wrong. And when things go wrong, elections officials want to make sure that people’s votes are still counted. What are all the sort of factors that go into people not being able to cast their votes right at 7 a.m. when polls open?
Carter, Votebeat: The person who’s running the polling place might oversleep. There could be a tree down on the road. A number of things can happen that could delay the polling places from opening.
If there’s a real problem that delays things for several hours or causes a problem for a lot of people, the county can go to a local judge and say, “Hey, we have this issue. Can you extend voting for a couple hours so that people can come back?”
Jordan, WITF: When something goes wrong and people have to cast provisional votes or put paper ballots into an emergency box, how do elections officials protect and secure those ballots throughout the day and then get them counted?
Carter, Votebeat: Election officials have multiple redundancies to make sure that voting can continue smoothly depending on what the problem might be. One of the things that they can do is have voters vote provisional ballots. The poll workers are going to walk you through what you need to fill out on the provisional ballot to make it counted. Then they’ll take those materials from you and they’ll put it in their bags that they have set aside for the provisional ballots.
If they’re using equipment like a touchscreen that’s recording a person’s vote and then printing out a piece of paper, but that goes down, then they’re going to have voters cast emergency paper ballots. That would be very similar to a process that people in other counties are used to, where you just fill out your paper ballot by hand and then they put it in a secure ballot box. That would be probably two of the more extreme cases of how they’d address an issue.
A lot of counties have what they call rovers, which is basically a poll worker or a county election official who drives around the county. They have extra equipment, they have stuff they need to fix equipment, so that’s going to be the first thing they try — sending one of those people out to just fix whatever the issue is.
Jordan, WITF: How do we know that throughout the day, there’s not more ballots being put in or ballots being taken out? How do we know that things aren’t being fiddled with in terms of vote counts if they’re just going into those emergency boxes?
Carter, Votebeat: The poll workers know every piece of equipment that they walk into that polling place with on election day. They know exactly how many provisional ballots they have, they know how many paper ballots they have.
The primary person in charge of the precinct — they’re keeping track of who is interacting with those materials all day. When a person comes in to vote, a poll worker finds them on what is called the “numbered list of voters.” So they are keeping track of exactly how many people came in to cast a ballot that day. They should know at the end of the day how many ballots that were cast, whether that’s provisional or a paper ballot. Once the polls close, they check that, “Okay, this is how many people came into the polling place today, and this is how many provisional ballots I have, this is how many paper ballots I had, this how many uncast ballots I have,” and those numbers should all add up and match each other. That’s how they know each ballot is accounted for.
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