For all of the drama surrounding this year's general election, the Allegheny County employees who administer the process of voting seemed comfortable about their preparations for Nov. 5. And while Election Day is two weeks away, the last Board of Elections meeting before the election offered plenty of evidence that county voters were already active.
Dave Voye, who heads the county election office, told the three-member board that the office had enlisted over 6,900 poll workers to staff its 1,300 polling places.
"We were full this morning [except for] a vacation on one judge of elections, which we have plenty of time to fill," he said.
The department also plans to have over 220 election workers at its North Side warehouse on Election Day, just to handle mail-in ballots. While the work of "precanvassing" ballots — removing them from envelopes and uncreasing them to be fed into optical scanners — can be time-consuming, the county's director of administrative services, Jessica Garofolo, said she expected the count to be done Tuesday evening.
"We've actually adjusted our staffing numbers to account for [the] increased level of ballot request," she told election board members.
County staff, meanwhile, were already busy processing voter registrations submitted just before the state's registration deadline of Monday.
"We have at least 24 people at our warehouse working on this backlog and people in the office," Voye said. "I suspect it should take a few days" to process those registrations.
As of Monday, the county had 522,653 registered Democrats and 271,117 Republicans. While that heavily favors Democrats, the GOP has narrowed the margin from the last presidential election by about 20,000 votes. At the time of the 2020 general election, there were 539,595 registered Democrats and 267,832 Republicans.
Democrats still enjoy a decided advantage in mail-in balloting: Out of the 228,439 mail-in ballot requests the county has received, fully two-thirds were requested by Democratic voters; GOP requests made up slightly more than one-fifth of the requests, with independent or minor-party voters accounting for the rest.
Democrats have also been more diligent about returning ballots: Two-thirds of the ballots requested have been returned, while 58 percent of Republican ballots have.
But voters have until 5 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 29 to request a ballot and up until Election Day to return it, and politicos generally expect the use of mail-in ballots to drop from the COVID19-driven highs of 2020. And there is at least anecdotal evidence to suggest Republicans have been somewhat quicker to embrace "satellite" voting centers established by the county this year.
The five satellites offer a number of voter services: Voters can register there, drop off completed mail-in ballots, and engage in a de facto form of early voting in which a voter requests a mail-in ballot, completes it and turns it in at the counter — all in one visit.
The centers have been open on varying schedules and have seen varying levels of usage. Soldiers & Sailors Memorial Hall & Museum, the first of the satellite centers to open, collected 1,916 ballots during the course of three days. But suburban satellite locations at the ice rinks in North and South Park have outpaced that total, collecting 2,219 and 1,871 ballots respectively in just two days. A fifth satellite center, at CCAC Homewood, collected 757 ballots in two days.
Anecdotal accounts suggest that, at the North Hills location in particular, a majority of over-the-counter voters have been Republicans. Leaders from Donald Trump on down have urged their partisans to take advantage of early-voting opportunities — though the Republican on the Board of Elections, Sam DeMarco, acknowledged Tuesday that he had opposed the satellite centers because "I didn't believe they were necessary."
But DeMarco joined a bipartisan consensus on the board that the county was as ready as it could be for Nov. 5.
"I believe we set the bar, the standard for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania," he said.
There have been hiccups. The county has received 913 mail-in votes that were defective in some way, typically that they weren't properly signed or dated. County officials have sent those back to the voters who submitted them in hopes that the voters will "cure" the defects and resubmit them — and 462 have already done so.
Board of Elections member Bethany Hallam asked election officials why they didn't post the names of voters whose ballots were flawed, in hopes of notifying them. Allegheny County has done so in the past, and other counties have continued the practice. Hallam said she worried that with voters who request ballots late and get notice of mistakes, "by the time they're received there's just not time" to correct them.
"There's been a policy decision ... to not post names of people that have made errors," said Allan Opsitnick, an assistant county solicitor. "We can effectively by mail ... address those."
Meanwhile, some mail-in ballots have arrived with their return envelopes already sealed, presumably from moisture in the air.
Voye said that "tops, maybe 500 or so" voters had reached out to complain about envelopes that had arrived already sealed.
"We are receiving calls from voters asking us to replace their envelopes," he said. "And we try to get them back out in the mail the same day."
Officials urge calling the county elections office or obtaining a new envelope from voting centers this coming weekend.
But things were going smoothly enough otherwise that elections board member and County Executive Sara Innamorato, who faces a contentious debate over a 2025 county budget that includes a property tax increase, made a case for the importance of county services.
After being told that the county spends $5 million to conduct an election — the state provides slightly less than that — Innamorato responded: "I think it's important for the public to remember now that we're in budget season, and we're negotiating on passing a budget that delivers on critical county services, that elections is something that we alone will administer to the people of Allegheny County, and it is at a significant cost.
"But we are doing everything that we can to make sure that we run safe, secure and accessible elections," she added. "And we're very proud of the infrastructure that we built."
