Bucks Co. Working On November Ballot Counting

BUCKS COUNTY, PA — Bucks County officials are working to try to speed up vote-counting for the presidential election in November.

This month, it took the better part of a week to officially count the county's ballots in the presidential primary. That was due, in large part, to the more than 78,000 mail-in and absentee ballots received, as voters sought to avoid the polls during the coronavirus pandemic.

"This is going to be a presidential election where Pennsylvania is going to play an important part in who gets elected president, to say nothing about our local elections for Congress and state representatives," said Bucks County Commissioner Gene DiGirolamo, during an online town hall meeting Monday.

DiGirolamo, a Republican who served for three decades as a state representative in Harrisburg, is one of five members of a newly created task force that will study the issue and make recommendations to state lawmakers.

Also on the task force are state Rep. Frank Farry, a Republican from Middletown, Rep. John Galloway, a Democrat from Falls, Bucks County Board of Elections Director Thomas Freitag and Bucks County Chief Clerk Gail Humphrey.

The purpose of the task force, DiGirolamo said, is to identify ways that changes in state law could help speed the vote-counting process, then bring those ideas to lawmakers.

"We want to look at possible changes in state law that will make it easier for our Board of Elections to be able to open envelopes and count ballots so that, possibly on election night, we should have a pretty good idea what the total vote count is," DiGirolamo said.

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

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

On Monday, DiGirolamo said those numbers are likely to be dwarfed by the numbers in November.

"I wouldn't be surprised if we're looking at, in November, maybe and 80 or 90 percent turnout," he said. "That will probably double, or maybe more, the number of absentee and mail-in ballots we received here in June.

"We've got our work cut out for us to try to figure out how to try to get these ballots counted right, to make sure every vote counts."