Pennsylvania sweats over vote-counting fiasco

From the article:

Election officials haven’t finished counting the vote because they are grappling with an influx of more than 1.4 million mail ballots after the state implemented no-excuse absentee voting for the first time ever amid a pandemic, widespread protests and riots. In Philadelphia, the biggest city in the state, only about 14,000 of nearly 160,000 mail and absentee ballots had been tallied as of Friday afternoon.

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Gov. Tom Wolf’s administration said it did not have the total number of uncounted mail ballots throughout the state. But Wanda Murren, spokeswoman for the Department of State, said 49 of the state’s 67 counties had finished tallying their mail ballots.

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Still, she said, there are lessons to be learned from the election officials who were able to count the mail ballots more quickly than others. “Allegheny County was able to accomplish this because they are using the highest speed, highest capacity ballot-handling and scanning equipment available. The department is encouraging other counties to use their recent federal subgrants to acquire equipment of similar capacity before November.”

Nick Custodio, a deputy city commissioner in Philadelphia, said that “in November, we are going to need to further modernize our processes and look to bring in additional equipment to speed up the processing of ballots.”

Officials in Philadelphia said Friday that they were working to check the poll books against the mail ballots to ensure that no one voted twice, likely accidentally because they were unaware their mail ballot had been received. They also said they had to move some of their operations out of City Hall because of the protests and looting downtown.