Some Bucks County Races Will Not Be Called Until Tuesday: Election 2021

BUCKS COUNTY, PA — Some closer Bucks County races may not be decided until Tuesday afternoon at the earliest while the board of elections tallies and determines the eligibility of some outstanding ballots, a county spokesperson told Patch Thursday.

The Bucks County Board of Elections last updated its unofficial election results on Wednesday afternoon, saying that counts for mail-in, absentee, and in-person ballots were still only partially reported.

In a news release Thursday afternoon, county officials said that approximately 2,615 ballots remain outstanding and uncounted. The total number of those votes that will count will be lower, as ballots that fail to meet legal criteria will be rejected.

According to James O'Malley, Bucks County's director of public information, 168 mail-in ballots in the county needed to be hand-counted due to machine-reading issues.

Some 943 of the ballots included in the total outstanding are provisional ballots cast at the polls Tuesday, a fail-safe measure to ensure a legitimate vote will be counted when voting eligibility is uncertain. Now, the board of elections needs to review each of those ballots and vote on whether or not they count in the election. That call is made for each ballot based on factors that can include the prior receipt of a mail-in ballot, a person actually residing outside county lines, expired voter registration, and more.

Segregated ballots include those with missing signatures, dates, secrecy envelopes, and other issues. These ballots are not included in the unofficial results posted online.

The segregated ballots include an estimated 1,145 mail-in or absentee ballots separated after, in most cases, a single voter improperly deposited more than one ballot in a drop box at a time despite warnings from staff manning the boxes.

When an individual wrongly deposits more than one ballot, all ballots contained in the drop box at the time of the deposit are segregated. The board will vote on whether or not to include the ballots in the final tally.

Other segregated mail-in/absentee ballots include:

• 273 “naked” ballots, or ballots which arrived without a secrecy envelope
• 127 ballots that were not dated
• 57 ballots with no signature
• 26 “partially naked” ballots, which arrived in unsealed secrecy envelopes
• 25 ballots which arrived in secrecy envelopes bearing identifying marks
• 11 ballots that arrived bearing a date that is out-of-range of the present election
• 8 ballots which were improperly received

Of the 191,476 ballots cast, more than 55,000 were mail-in or absentee received either through the mail or from one of 11 ballot drop boxes.

Leading up to the public meeting Tuesday at 1 p.m., the board of elections will review each outstanding ballot before presenting their assessment and final numbers.

The board of elections said the delay is also due in part to a legal mandate that staffers cannot begin pre-canvassing ballots before 7 a.m. on Election Day. During pre-canvassing, mail-in and absentee ballots are opened and prepared for tabulation.

O'Malley said that, while these as yet un-counted ballots could certainly decide smaller races depending on precinct locations, county-wide races like the contest for district attorney will not see any substantive changes to their current results.

All election results will remain “unofficial” until the board meets to certify the results. This typically occurs within a few weeks of the election.

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