Luzerne County Election Operations Manager Emily Cook
Luzerne County’s unofficial primary election results will be updated today to add vote tallies from at least 280 ballots the county election board accepted during adjudication, county Election Operations Manager Emily Cook said Monday.
This update does not include write-in results for candidates who did not appear on the ballot because those will be addressed in the next phase of adjudication, officials said.
Today’s update will provide closure for candidates who ended up too close for comfort to an opponent in the unofficial election night results.
The most high-profile race fitting this description is the sixth available Republican nomination slot in the county council race. Incumbent Matthew Mitchell is poised to receive the nomination, and Gregory W. Griffin is trailing behind him with 157 fewer votes.
It’s unclear how many ballots pending uploading are Republican because no party breakdown was available. The election results update at luzernecounty.org will incorporate these additions, Cook said:
• 94 mail ballots that had been flagged for further review (488 others were rejected)
• 109 provisional ballots cast at polling places (54 others were rejected)
• More than 77 ballots from several polling places in which voters were incorrectly handed provisional paper ballots instead of the designated regular ones to hand-mark their selections. This error was discovered and stopped early on Election Day because the scanners/tabulators wouldn’t accept them, officials said. Poll workers were instructed to segregate the unscanned ballots and turned them in for processing.
The number of impacted ballots will be slightly higher than the 77 stated last week because the bureau found a few more such ballots in some locked scanner emergency bins that judges of elections did not retrieve and turn in with other paperwork on election night, Cook said.
These ballots must be transposed onto regular ballots by a bi-partisan team seated near the board so they could be scanned in, and that transposing process is set to resume this morning before the website results update, Cook said.
Only two military/overseas ballots have been received, and today is the deadline for them to be in the bureau, Cook said.
The election bureau had considered an incremental update of the online results Monday but decided to wait until all additional ballots are processed and complete one revision, Cook said.
Another close race is the Democratic nomination for Hazleton city mayor. As it was left on election night, candidate Vianney Castro was ahead by 17 votes, receiving 462 votes compared to 445 for opponent Robert Yevak.
The updated results are needed to determine if any of the additional outstanding ballots include Hazleton Democratic votes and, if so, whether they will alter the outcome in this race.
The five-citizen, volunteer election board’s second day of adjudication Monday ran from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. and will resume at 9 a.m. today at the county’s Penn Place building on Pennsylvania Avenue in Wilkes-Barre. It is open to the public.
Cook said the board intends to start adjudicating write-in votes today. This process will be more challenging because the county election bureau opted to use paper ballots at polling places, which means handwritten selections must be deciphered. Voters type in write-in selections on the electronic ballot marking devices, but only one device was at each polling place in the primary as required for those with disabilities.
