Bucks Co. Gets Extra Week To Count Mail-In Ballots

BUCKS COUNTY, PA — Bucks County ballots cast by mail in Tuesday's primary elections will be counted if they arrive within the next week, after a judge's ruling late on Election Day.

Bucks County Solicitor Joseph Khan, speaking at Wednesday morning's Board of Commissioners meeting, confirmed that a judge granted the county an extra week for the ballots to be counted. Any ballot postmarked before Election Day that arrives at the county Board of Elections office by 5 p.m. on Tuesday, June 9, will be counted, he said.

Bucks County officials had petitioned for longer to count the votes due to an overwhelming number of requests for mail-in ballots for Tuesday's primaries. On Wednesday, Bucks County Chief Operating Officer Margaret McKevitt said roughly half the votes cast in Tuesday's primaries were cast by mail or dropped off in boxes the county provided.

Election workers in Bucks County were not allowed to start counting those ballots until 8 p.m. Tuesday — which was a key reason final results from the primaries still had not been announced as of noon Wednesday.

At Wednesday's meeting, Bucks officials also announced more details on problems with some ballots at the polls on Tuesday.

According to officials, an undetermined number of precincts had batches of ballots with "slight irregularities" that made them a fraction of an inch too wide to fit easily into the county's new voting-machine scanners.

On Wednesday, commission Chairwoman Diane Ellis Marseglia said it appears that roughly 40 percent of the county's ballots were about 1/16th of an inch too wide and had to be forced into scanners on the county's new voting machines.

The error was caused by a printing vendor that has apologized, saying it usual testing protocols were laxer than normal because of the coronavirus quarantine.

Marseglia said that, fairly early in the day, poll workers figured out the ballots would work more easily if they were trimmed slightly. Commissioner Bob Harvie, one of two Democrats on the three-member board, said his ballot was one of the problem ones.

"My ballot barely, barely fit and I knew something was wrong with it as I was going to put it in because I went through some of the training here," Harvie said. "I knew how easily it was supposed to slide in."

Marseglia and other officials said that, overall, election workers in Bucks County did a good job during a primary that could have gone haywire due to new voting machines, the large number of mail-ins, coronavirus concerns and more.

She said the issue with the ballot irregularities won't happen again.

"We will have that corrected ...," she said. "We have a big election in November and I'm glad we got that out of the way now."