Printing error forces Pennsylvania county to switch ballots

By MARK SCOLFORO Related Press

Elections officers in a central Pennsylvania county had been scrambling on Monday to repair an error on greater than 18,000 mail-in ballots for the spring main, when voters will elect judges for the state Supreme Court docket and different positions.

Late final week somebody observed that the poll for Superior Court docket instructed Republican and Democratic main voters to choose just one judicial candidate to appoint from their get together, when actually voters may choose two, in keeping with Lancaster County’s elections board. There are two vacancies to fill on the mid-level appeals court docket.

By early Monday afternoon, postal officers had helped Lancaster, which is about 71 miles (114 kilometers) west of Philadelphia, intercept and safely safe over 15,000 of the affected ballots, officers stated.

The issue comes as voters are simply receiving mail-in ballots for the first, which additionally features a emptiness on the state Supreme Court docket.

Voters will obtain replacements with corrected wording and a sheet of directions. Those that obtained an misguided poll had been advised to throw it out and await a substitute. Ballots from those that fill out and return misguided variations will likely be “put aside” by the elections board, the county stated.

The deadline to return mail-in ballots is Could 16.

Pennsylvania is a intently divided swing state that’s anticipated to be a significant battleground in subsequent 12 months’s presidential contest. Lancaster is a Republican-majority space with a big farm economic system and a rising suburban inhabitants. Greater than 220,000 Lancaster residents voted within the November gubernatorial election.

Lancaster County additionally had a printing drawback with main ballots a 12 months in the past, when a vendor mailed ballots with the incorrect ID code, stopping scanning machines from studying them. About one-third of the 21,000-plus ballots affected final 12 months had been in a position to be correctly scanned. The votes needed to be painstakingly transferred to contemporary ballots.

Lancaster additionally confronted a poll printing error in 2021, when a lot of main mail-in ballots needed to be counted by hand, delaying last outcomes. In that case, the Lancaster County Board of Elections stated some 14,000 multi-sheet ballots had been printed within the incorrect order.