Mail ballots cause headaches for tracking vote totals

(The Center Square) — A proposal for election transparency has one state legislator going against the Department of State. At the center of the split: changes made to Pennsylvania’s elections stemming from the passage of Act 77 of 2019.

Rep. Brad Roae, R-Meadville, introduced House Bill 2542 to require the Department to again update precinct counts online, allowing voters to see how the count is progressing.

“The election returns portion of the Department of State website previously showed how many voting precincts there were and how many precincts had been counted,” Roae wrote in a legislative memo . “It also showed what percent of the precincts had reported. The Department of State still gets this information, but they removed it from their website so that citizens can no longer see it.”

Restoring those counts to the state website, he argued, was a “common sense piece of legislation.”

“They took that away, so the public has less access to election results; there's less transparency and I’m trying to fix it,” Roae said.

In the memo, he argued there is “no valid reason for removing this important piece of information from the Department of State website.”

State elections officials, however, disagree. Restoring the precinct count, they argued, would create more problems.

“With the increased number of mail-in ballots cast in each election since the passage of Act 77, this information no longer accurately reflected the progress of total vote counting and so was removed prior to the 2020 General Election,” Department of State Press Secretary Matt Heckel said. “This is because mail ballots are counted by county boards of elections, not by precincts. Displaying only the number of precincts reporting returns will not capture the true progress of canvassing and counting both in person and mail ballots.”

A precinct counter would only show in-person votes, giving the public a false impression. Mail ballots don’t have a precinct-level designation, according to the department.

“If we post how many precincts have counted votes and how many are still out there, it just doesn't accurately reflect how many mail-in ballots are out there,” Heckel said. “Obviously, since 2020, that’s a large portion of the remaining ballots. We thought it was confusing to folks and just wasn’t all that accurate.”

Instead of a precinct count, the department publishes a supplemental report online that updates once a day and includes in-person ballots, along with absentee and mail ballots.