Luzerne County Council set to receive briefing on change to hand-marked ballots

Luzerne County Election Director Eryn Harvey is scheduled to brief county council Tuesday on the switch to hand-marked paper ballots at polling places in the upcoming primary election, the agenda says.

Council members had agreed to request more information when Councilman Stephen J. Urban publicly raised questions and concerns about the change during the March 28 council meeting.

County Election Board members also had an extensive discussion about the matter during last week’s board meeting.

Urban said he still has lingering concerns, chiefly about the election bureau’s ability to fully train poll workers on the change and ensure every voter receives the correct party ballot at each of the 186 voting precincts.

Harvey will present during Tuesday’s work session, which follows a 6 p.m. voting meeting at the county courthouse on River Street in Wilkes-Barre. Remote attendance instructions will be posted under council’s online meeting link at luzernecounty.org.

The election bureau decided primary voters at the polls will mark their selections on paper ballots instead of using electronic ballot marking devices that generate ballot printouts for review. Voters will still be required to feed the hand-marked ballots into the county’s Dominion Voting Systems tabulators to be cast, as they did with the printouts.

While each of the 186 precincts must still have a ballot marking device available for those with disabilities in the primary, Harvey had said the plan will reduce the county’s expense for Dominion to bring a team of 10 or so representatives here for two weeks to program and test all of the approximately 700 ballot marking devices.

Essentially, the plan would free up the bureau to concentrate on other pressing matters before the election and increase the bureau’s workload after the election, when results must be reconciled before certification, Harvey had said.

When introducing the hand-marked ballot plan to the election board last month, Harvey said voters successfully used ballots filled out by hand during a Jan. 31 state senate special election impacting 18 municipalities. The election bureau received a significant level of positive feedback from both voters and poll workers, she had said.

It was also noted during last week’s election board meeting that paper ballots were used in the county’s 2020 primary election due to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, board member Audrey Serniak pointed out that election was different because the number of voting locations was temporarily reduced from 144 to 58 to alleviate concerns about proper social distancing and pandemic-related shortages of poll workers and polling places.

Urban said there were cases of precincts receiving the wrong ballots in the 2020 primary, which makes him uneasy.

“It hasn’t been tried and tested en masse. Because this worked in a small special election does not mean it will with all 186 precincts,” Urban said.

For background, Harvey has said the tabulators will be set up to alert voters on the spot if they attempt to scan in a ballot containing more than the allowable number of selections in any races, known as overvotes. In such situations, voters would have the option to continue casting the ballot as is or having their ballot formally voided/spoiled through the judge of elections so they can receive a new one.

The bureau has ordered enough ballots for all registered voters in the unlikely event of a 100% turnout, although much of the stock will be securely stored in the election bureau and delivered only if a precinct informs the county it is running low. Each precinct will receive more than the statutory limit of blank ballots, based on past primary election turnout, said Harvey and Election Deputy Director Beth Gilbert.

Gilbert assured poll worker training will address the overvoting alert, ballot spoiling procedures and need to verify the correct ballots have been provided at each polling place.

Poll worker training is set to start the week of April 17, with sessions in both Wilkes-Barre and Butler Township, Gilbert said.

Separate classes will be offered for judges of election.

The training schedule and a link to register are posted on the election page at luzernecounty.org.

In the 2020 primary, voters received pens to mark their ballots. Three-sided, tabletop privacy screens were set up.

Harvey said the county has an ample supply of pens, and the bureau has ordered pop-up privacy stations. Voters will stand at these stations to make their selections instead of sitting at tables. Each precinct will have four privacy stations, she said.

A county council majority had approved the $3.6 million purchase of the Dominion ballot marking devices, scanner/tabulators and related equipment in December 2019 as part of a state mandate requiring a system that provides a paper trail. With the exception of the ballot marking devices, the rest of the Dominion system will be used in the primary, officials said.