Twenty-three people who cast emergency ballots at a Washington County precinct Tuesday may find their votes in jeopardy after an electronic poll book failure meant none of them were ever recorded in a required backup paper ledger. The problem, discovered at the Miraculous Medal Banquet Hall precinct known as Chartiers-3, triggered a scramble by county officials to track the voters down before polls closed and led a judge to pull the precinct's election chief from his post mid-Election Day.
Poll Book Fails, Then a Judge Steps In
According to the Observer-Reporter, the trouble began when the precinct's electronic poll book malfunctioned, and an elections-office worker did not arrive to address it until roughly an hour later, around 10 a.m. In that window, 23 voters cast ballots without being instructed to sign the backup paper ledger meant to catch exactly this kind of outage, the paper reported. Washington County Judge Traci McDonald issued a court order shortly after 5 p.m. removing Chartiers-3 Judge of Election Andrew Cleary and replacing him, according to the same report.
Per WPXI, the court also ordered the precinct to stay open until 10 p.m. — two hours past the normal 8 p.m. closing — and urged the 23 emergency-ballot voters to come back. The station reported that Washington County officials kept polls open that extra stretch specifically so those voters could return and cast a provisional ballot. WPXI's reporting notes the court order characterized the situation as a breakdown in procedural requirements, and said the 23 voters were not required to sign the poll book themselves.
A Scramble to Track Down Voters
The Observer-Reporter's account says officials tried to locate the 23 voters and get them back to the precinct before the original 8 p.m. closing. A hearing was scheduled for Wednesday to determine whether people who were unable to return to the precinct should still have their vote counted, the outlet reported — leaving the ultimate fate of those ballots unresolved as of the reporting.
A Pennsylvania Election Code provision, under the Act of March 27, 2020, P.L. 41, No. 12, states that a person not shown on the district register as having voted may cast a provisional ballot under section 1210(a.4)(1). The excerpt doesn't address how that standard applies to the Chartiers-3 situation specifically, and the evidence available does not establish how the Wednesday hearing resolved the 23 ballots in question.
Glitches Surfaced Elsewhere Too
WPXI also reported scattered technical hiccups elsewhere in the region Tuesday. Ballot scanner jams were reported in Economy Borough and Rochester Borough in Beaver County, where officials placed ballots in an auxiliary tray until troubleshooters cleared the jams, per the station's reporting. A separate scanner jam was reported at the Adams Township Municipal Building in Butler County.
In Fayette County, a printing glitch prevented 308 people from receiving their mail-in ballots, according to WPXI's reporting. The Observer-Reporter's separate account of the day's voting cited Fayette County Elections Director Marybeth Kuznik, who said her office worked to notify 300 voters who did not get their mail-in ballots because of an unknown error — a figure the available reporting does not reconcile with WPXI's count. Kuznik said many of the voters her office reached said they would come to the polls to vote with a provisional ballot or pick up a new mail-in ballot in person.
Mail Ballots Flowed Steadily in Greene County
Not every county's Election Day numbers told a story of trouble. The Observer-Reporter reported that, as of Tuesday morning, 1,938 of the 2,189 Greene County voters who had requested a mail-in ballot had already turned theirs in — about an 89% return rate, a sign that most of the region's mail voting proceeded without the kind of disruption seen in Chartiers Township or Fayette County.
