Interest in next month’s election is high, and Lancaster County’s Elections Office is gearing up accordingly, Elections Chief Clerk Christa Miller said Wednesday.
Miller briefed the county commissioners, in their role as the Board of Elections, on the status of mail-in balloting and early voting and her office’s preparations for in-person balloting on Election Day, Tuesday, Nov. 5.
Headlining the election is the presidential contest between Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump. Pennsylvania is considered a crucial state by both campaigns, and polling indicates the race is essentially a dead heat, with the winner’s margin likely to be razor-thin.
As of Wednesday, there were 361,859 registered voters in Lancaster County, an all-time record, Miller said. The deadline to register is this coming Monday, Oct. 21; it’s possible the final total will exceed 363,000, she said.
So far, 59,967 Lancaster County voters have requested mail-in ballots, of which 27,997 have been returned. The deadline to request a mail-in ballot is 5 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 29. In general, voters are returning their ballots earlier, which is a good thing, Miller said.
Voters who want to vote in person before Election Day can request a mail-in ballot at the Elections Office, which is in the County Government Center, 150 N. Queen St., Lancaster. Once their application is vetted and approved, they can receive a ballot, fill it out in the building’s first-floor lobby and return it to Elections Office staff.
People have been arriving in steady numbers to do so, Miller said. Her office is offering extended hours to accommodate them and is prepared to put out additional voting stations if need be. The sheriff’s deputies who staff the metal detectors at the building entrance have done a fantastic job directing people, answering questions and keeping order, she said.
The lobby isn’t the ideal location, she conceded — among other things, it can get noisy — but there isn’t anywhere else available. The Elections Office itself would be too small. At Commissioner Alice Yoder’s suggestion, Miller said she’d look into posting signage encouraging people to be quiet.
Tracking your ballot
Out of the 27,997 mail-in ballots returned so far, 265 have been rejected for clerical errors: A missing envelope signature or a missing or improper date. That information is uploaded to Pennsylvania’s Statewide Uniform Registry of Electors or “SURE” voter rolls management system; in most cases, that results in an automatic notification going out to the voter by text or email.
If voters haven’t provided contact information, they can check their ballot’s status on the state’s tracking portal. If your mail-in ballot has been rejected, or you’re not sure of its status, you are allowed to vote by provisional ballot on Election Day.
Election Day
Miller said her office is expecting 55,000 to 60,000 mail-in ballots by the deadline, 8 p.m. Election Day.
Under state law, they cannot be “pre-canvassed” — the term refers to opening ballot envelopes and preparing ballots for scanning — until Election Day itself. That makes for a challenging logistics operation, as the county strives to process tens of thousands of ballots from start to finish in less than 24 hours.
In recent elections, volunteers have pre-canvassed in a conference room on the County Government Center’s ground floor. That area is too small for this year’s expected volume, so the operation is moving to the second floor, to space temporarily vacated by the county’s Children & Youth Agency due to the flooding incident earlier this year.
Access to the canvassing operation is provided to designated political party observers and the county will continue to allow access to credentialed media, Communications Director Michael Fitzpatrick said.
The county will have 80 to 90 volunteers available on Election Day to process mail-in ballots, Miller said, including a substantial core group of people with previous experience. That’s about double the number deployed in 2022, and it should be enough to get through the workload and post results by midnight, if all goes well, she said.
To help, the county bought three tabletop envelope openers to supplement the large high-speed one it has been using. That removes a choke point, as staff will no longer have to wait in line to use a single machine, Miller said.
Ricardo Almodovar, an organizer with ACLU Pennsylvania, asked if the board had considered the petition he delivered at a previous meeting requesting drop-boxes, allowing voters to correct ballots rejected for clerical errors (called “notice and cure”) and expand language access.
The county previously worked with the organization Latino Justice to ensure all election information is provided in Spanish as well as English, Miller and Solicitor Jackie Pfursich said. As for drop boxes and notice-and-cure, they are not explicitly provided for in the Election Code, and the board accordingly has decided against offering them, Commissioner Ray D’Agostino said.
