More Than 60K Bucks Co. Ballots Still To Be Counted

BUCKS COUNTY, PA — More than 60,000 ballots received by mail for Bucks County's primary elections held his week were yet to be counted as of Thursday, county officials said.

Tom Freitag, director of the Bucks County Board of Elections, said the county received roughly 78,000 votes either by absentee or mail-in ballot. Of those, about 15,000 had been counted as of Thursday morning, he said.

He said he expects the county to have a final tally of the votes by late Friday or early Saturday.

"We're going to be working late tonight, late into tomorrow," Freitag said during an online news conference on Thursday.

Like other Pennsylvania counties, Bucks was flooded with mail-in ballot requests for Tuesday's primary due to concerns about the coronavirus outbreak. By law, election workers were not allowed to begin counting those ballots until polls closed Tuesday night.

In comparison to the 78,000 or so mail votes, Bucks County received about 6,000 ballots by mail in the last presidential primary in 2016.

Late Tuesday, a judge granted Bucks County's request for an extra week to accept and count ballots received by mail in the election. Election workers may now count any ballot that is postmarked no later than Monday and which arrives by 5 p.m. next Tuesday.

Freitag also addressed problems some voters who went to the polls had with ballots that were too big to fit easily into the scanners of the county's new voting machines.

The problem cropped up at 74 of the county's 304 precincts, according to Freitag. In all, about 3,500 votes were placed in emergency ballot bags and scanned successfully at the county elections board's headquarters, he said.

The problem ballots, printed by a county vendor, were about 1/16th of an inch too wide, officials said. Poll workers figured out relatively early Tuesday that they could be trimmed to fit the voting machines or, in some cases, would scan if inserted with a little extra force.

Freitag said the problem affected both Republican and Democratic ballots.

"It actually seemed to affect both parties," he said. "I don't know if it was equal or not ... but there were Democrat and Republican ballots in there."

He said there was relatively little trouble with people showing up to vote without a mask or other face covering on Tuesday, with only two known instances. In both cases, the voters used face masks provided to them by poll workers, Freitag said.

There also was one instance in which officials spoke with a poll worker who was reported to not be wearing a mask properly.

Bucks County required face masks for people voting in person in an effort to curb the spread of the coronavirus. Other precautions, including hand sanitizer at the polls, plexiglass shields and the like, were added for the election.