Vendor working with county to remedy secrecy envelope issue

Approximately 25 Luzerne County voters contacted the county election bureau to report they did not receive secrecy envelopes with their Nov. 7 general election mail ballots, but more may be unknowingly impacted, county administrators said Thursday.

While the 25 voters waited until the situation was remedied to send in their ballots, 17 of the more than 3,000 mail ballots returned to date are missing secrecy envelopes.

The number itself is not abnormal because there are typically 250 voters in every election who fail to insert their ballots in secrecy envelopes as instructed, administrators said. However, 16 of the 17 were from the same geographic location — the Plains Township area — prompting officials to question if these voters may have failed to receive secrecy envelopes and returned their ballots without alerting the county.

Pennsylvania-based NPC Inc. — the county vendor that prints the ballots, assembles the ballot packages and mails them — provided this explanation for the missing secrecy envelopes, according to the county:

”Based on our further review, we believe the machine operator placed the inserting equipment into a manual override while he attended to a nonconformity that was detected at the beginning of the inserting line. While the nonconformity was being corrected at the beginning of the line and because the machine was in a manual override setting, the machine continued to run slowly through its normal pulling sequence for other inserts down the line (in this case, the secrecy envelope, which was missed). Because the machine was only in override mode for short periods, we do not believe the omitted secrecy envelope issue is widespread.”

The company added that the operator has been retrained to “not allow the machine to continue to operate in override mode.”

NPC said it is committed to working with Luzerne County to “remedy the issue as best we can.”

The county asked NPC to review surveillance footage of its ballot packaging and other data to determine if it can generate a list of voters who did not receive secrecy envelopes, but it’s unclear if extraction of that information is possible, officials said.

Without such a list, the county will have no documented way to determine if any returned ballots missing secrecy envelopes are due to the vendor omission, administrators said.

The bureau already has been in communication with the 25 voters who did not yet mail in their ballots to make arrangements for the voters to pick up a secrecy envelope or have one mailed to them by the county, administrators said.

Voters who already returned ballots without secrecy envelopes will be contacted and provided with instructions on how they can remedy the situation, the administration said.

Ballot envelopes cannot be unsealed until Election Day, but the bureau has early knowledge of which do not have inner secrecy envelopes because it has a ballot sorting machine purchased before the 2022 general election. The sorting machine has settings to flag various mail ballot deficiencies, including a detector that segregates those that are too thin because they do not have an inner envelope.

To be counted, a ballot must be placed inside the blank white secrecy envelope that is then inserted in an outer envelope with a label/barcode and signed and dated by the voter. The bar code, when scanned, identifies that voter in the state’s database.

When election workers are permitted to start processing mail ballots on Election Day, the secrecy envelopes are shuffled before the ballots inside are removed as a precaution so ballots can’t be linked to specific individuals.

Voters with further questions or a request to have a secrecy envelope mailed to them should contact the bureau at 570-825-1715 or by emailing elections@luzernecounty.org. The bureau is located on the second floor of the county’s Penn Place building, 20 N. Pennsylvania Ave., Wilkes-Barre.

Mail ballots have been sent to approximately 22,000 county voters who requested them to date.

In a separate issue, the election bureau is awaiting confirmation from NPC Inc. on the resending of ballots to 1,557 Wilkes-Barre voters who received the wrong ballot due to a problem that occurred when the mail ballot data was exported and uploaded by the county, administrators said.

At some point in the transfer, some of the Wilkes-Barre data did not line up in the correct precinct order, causing the ballots mailed to be out of sync.

Those voters are in city Wards 2 to 8 and 14 to 20.

An announcement will be made when the county verifies that NPC has mailed new ballots to those voters, the administration said.