Luzerne County provides update on two mail ballot issues

New Nov. 7 general election mail ballots were transported to the Wilkes-Barre Post Office Friday afternoon for direct delivery to 1,557 city voters who received the wrong ones, the Luzerne County Election Bureau said in its weekly update.

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

According to the county, the problem occurred when data files specifying which ballots these voters were supposed to receive did not correctly synchronize when files were merged. The county is still assessing why those particular city precincts had an issue when others synchronized correctly during merging, officials said.

The bureau also provided an update on another election issue involving missing secrecy envelopes.

Approximately 25 county voters contacted the county election bureau to report they did not receive secrecy envelopes with their mail ballots as of Thursday evening, and the bureau made arrangements for them to pick up the blank secrecy envelopes or have one mailed to them.

The county also has instructed Pennsylvania-based NPC Inc. — the county vendor that prints the ballots, assembles the ballot packages and mails them — to issue a secrecy envelope to all voters who potentially did not receive a ballot along with instructions.

NPC told the county it believes secrecy envelopes were missed because a 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.

“Because the machine was only in override mode for short periods, we do not believe the omitted secrecy envelope issue is widespread,” the company said, adding the operator has been retrained to “not allow the machine to continue to operate in override mode.”

Other voters may have been impacted and unknowingly returned their ballots without the secrecy envelope, the bureau said.

Ballots that have been returned to the office that are missing a secrecy envelope will be flagged in the state voter tracking system and generate an email to inform voters, the bureau’s update said.

Any voters who returned their ballot without the secrecy envelope are asked to immediately contact the bureau for further assistance 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.

Voters also can check the status of their returned mail ballot at https://www.pavoterservices.pa.gov/pages/ballottracking.aspx, the bureau said.

If there are no issues, the tracker will say the ballot has been returned and recorded. For those with fatal defects that would prevent the ballot from being counted, the tracker will indicate the ballot has been cancelled and state a reason, such as a missing secrecy envelope, the bureau 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 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 barcode, 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.