Luzerne County Election Bureau demonstrates new ballot sorting machine

In a few minutes Friday afternoon, Luzerne County’s Election Bureau sorted 750 unopened ballots into various groups — a task that would take hours without a new machine, said Acting Election Director Beth McBride.

Based on the envelope weight, the machine weeds out those missing required inner secrecy envelopes or containing more than the one permissible ballot inside.

It also detects outer envelopes missing required voter signatures and dates and those with tears that will warrant further future review by the county’s volunteer citizen Election Board during adjudication.

Ballots also are recorded as received through the new machine, preventing the need for workers to individually scan the barcodes, McBride said.

Unopened ballots with no deficiencies are deposited in sorting machine slots labeled “good” and moved to secure storage in the election bureau, where they will remain until the county is permitted to start unsealing them at 7 a.m. on Election Day, McBride said.

Ballot envelopes flagged by the sorting machine are personally inspected by bureau workers and then passed through the sorter again so they can be separated into the appropriate categories and placed into storage, she said.

McBride, county Administrative Services Division Head Jennifer Pecora and Acting Deputy Election Director Emily Cook demonstrated the sorting machine for election board members and the media.

County Manager Randy Robertson said the sorting machine is an example of how technology can be used to improve the voting process. He also commended McBride and Cook for working as a team to run the bureau, which had been plagued with management turnover, saying they are doing an “extraordinary job.” He presented them with a commemorative medallion containing the county seal.

“It’s a tough job,” he said, adding that election workers must “take abuse.”

The election bureau requested the ballot sorting machine purchase with state election integrity grant funding, arguing it would speed up election night tallying and reduce staff needed to manually scan mail ballot outer envelopes to mark them as received and separate them.

The county must complete its unofficial tally of ballots, including mail ones, by midnight on election night as a condition for its acceptance of the new $1.04 million election integrity grant. In addition to the sorting machine, portions of grant funding are being used to hire temporary workers.

McBride said 35 temporary Election Day workers have been hired at $20 per hour to assist with mail ballot processing under bureau supervision. These workers, solicited through public advertisements, must take an oath and undergo training for approximately two hours on Nov. 7.

In comparison, the administration had assigned approximately 15 employees from other county departments to help with ballot processing in the primary, she said.

The process to start unsealing mail ballot envelopes and scanning the ballots inside, known as pre-canvassing, begins at 7 a.m. on Election Day inside a third-floor courtroom at the county’s Penn Place Building in downtown Wilkes-Barre, which also houses the election bureau.

By law, counties cannot start uploading mail ballot results — known as canvassing — until the polls close at 8 p.m., officials said.

To date, the county has issued 32,600 mail ballots to voters requesting them and received 19,984 completed ballots back from voters.

Following Friday’s demonstration, Election Board Chairwoman Denise Williams said the new sorting machine will definitively save time because workers don’t have to manually record each ballot as received and group them into categories.

Williams said she plans to confirm that ballots are being correctly sorted through spot checks.

“In the end, we go through every ballot with a deficiency, so if there’s one in the wrong category, we would catch it,” she said.

Election Board member Alyssa Fusaro reiterated her displeasure that the administration did not bid out the machine purchase or consider a temporary option in case the no-excuse mail ballot option is eliminated. The election bureau maintained the purchased machine was the only one that met its needs, making it a sole-source contract that did not require bids.

“I think it’s a complete waste of money,” Fusaro said.

In total, 204,207 county residents are registered to cast ballots in the Nov. 8 general election. Voters are free to pick candidates of any party affiliation in the general.