Election boards in almost all of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties are gearing up for a monumental task.
Sixty-four of them applied for and received a share of $45 million in new state grant money. The cash pool is designed to cover nine different types of election costs counties have had to bear by themselves for decades. Think staff salaries, ballot printing, and postage.
The grant amounts are based on how many registered voters a county will have to serve in this year’s midterms and next year’s primary – giving election boards a substantial cash boost. Philadelphia County got a $5.4 million cut. Forest County in northwest Pennsylvania got a little over $17,000.
But there’s a catch: county boards will have to prove that their workers processed and counted all mail-in ballots starting on the Nov. 8 election day without stopping – or they’ll forfeit the money. The state could also claw back that money if boards fail to post their progress online by midnight that evening.
The trouble is, tens of thousands of early ballots may have piled up by Election Day in some places – and state law prevents election workers from getting started on the process until 7 a.m. that day.
“It’s going to be a long day for everyone involved, but we’re going to do our best to follow the law as it is,” Berks County Public Relations Office Stephanie Weaver said. “We’re going to make sure that happens one way or another.”
For the most part, counties say they’re ready to tackle the requirements. Some have even held vote counting marathons in past elections.
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Berks, Allegheny, Montgomery are all hiring extra workers – from a few dozen to as many as 100 – whose only job will be to process and count mail-in ballots using scanning equipment. Each of those counties have been marathoning their counts since 2020, when voters were first allowed to cast a mail ballot without an excuse.
“In this past primary, we opened and counted a little over 90,000 ballots,”Allegheny County Elections Division Manager David Voye said. “We’re not allowed to provide results until after 8 p.m., but I believe the counting was done by 2 [p.m.]”
Cumberland County is also bringing on a few dozen extra workers – but will be counting votes non-stop for the first time.
“That’s why we planned on having [three] shifts,” elections director Bethany Salzarulo said. Workers will be staggered in morning, afternoon, and evening shifts until the count is finished.
In Schuylkill County, just over a dozen employees and volunteers are helping process early ballots. Northumberland County is bringing in workers from different departments to do the job.
Crawford County, meanwhile, is one of only three that did not ask for a share of the multimillion dollar pot. Commissioner John Christopher Soff called the nonstop counting requirement “ludicrous,” adding his county has always strived for “accuracy over speed” when counting their votes.
“We just don’t think that these two [vote counting] requirements make sense,” Soff said. “I think if our legislators that put these measures forth had actually worked in elections, they would understand that.”
State lawmakers agreed to roll legislation creating what’s called the Election Integrity Grant into this year’s state budget. Former President Donald Trump and his allies have falsely argued that election officials fraudulently altered Pennsylvania’s 2020 election results because it took several days to count the votes in some places.
State-mandated election audits and experts of both parties have concluded that Pennsylvania’s 2020 election was secure from fraud and that its result was accurate. Even third-party reviews of election materials have turned up no evidence of fraud or malfeasance in the contest.
Some county boards say they could speed up the process if workers could remove early ballots from their security envelopes and prepare them to be scanned before 7 a.m. on Election Day. Despite repeated calls for the change, lawmakers have so far refused to do so.
