Due to the changes in state election law and a massive turnout for mail-in and absentee voting, Bucks County will likely not have unofficial election results by late election night or early the next morning.
Over the years, Pennsylvanians have become used to having unofficial election results within hours of the polls closing. Using unofficial results, which usually aren’t certified for a week or two after the election, news organizations, candidates, and the public have been able to make normally-accurate projections on who won elections.
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This year, that is expected to be different.
Votes cast in person will be tallied on election night by pulling in memory sticks from the ballot scanners at polling places around the county and mail-in and absentee ballots will begin to be counted.
The delay is expected to come from mail-in and absentee ballots that are being tallied, a more labor-intensive process.
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While mail-in and absentee ballots are scanned in and fed through high-speed readers to tally votes, the process to open the envelopes, confirm they are completed correctly, flatten ballots to go through the scanners, and matched to their precinct takes some time.
County election officials aren’t able to starting counting ballots until 8 p.m. on election night.
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County officials have said that efforts to speed up the time-consuming process of preparing mail-in and absentee ballots to be counted would help get results quicker.
The Bucks County Commissioners hoped that allowing election staff to open returned ballots and to prepare them to be counted a few days in advance would be helpful in speeding things up, but efforts to allow pre-canvassing in the state appear to have died in Harrisburg,
“Our plan is to spend a good part of election day to open every ballot we have,” said Commissioner Bob Harvie, who also is a member of the Board of Elections.
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Harvie said the first results will be made public on 10 p.m. on election night and updated roughly every 90 minutes as counting goes on.
County officials have said it is almost certain full unofficial results will be known in Bucks County on election night and that seems to be the case around the state.
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More than 2.8 million Pennsylvanians have requested mail-in ballots. In Bucks County, about 40 percent of eligible voters have requested mail-in or absentee ballots.
To add to potential delays in counting ballots, a recent Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling also allows mail-in and absentee ballots postmarked by election day to be counted by county election officials if they are received by 5 p.m. on Friday, November 6.
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Bucks County has received approximately 200,000 applications for mail-in or absentee ballots as of last week. The majority of voters who applied for ballots have had their requests approved and ballots have been sent.
Six experts western Pennsylvania news outlet Public Source spoke with had a similar assessment.
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“We’re not going to know it on election night. That’s just the way it’s going to be,” Marian Schneider, an election and voting rights consultant for the ACLU of Pennsylvania and the former president of the election integrity nonprofit Verified Voting, told Public Source. “We’re going to have to have patience. The value should be accuracy.”
Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar, who oversees elections in the state, told reporters recently that most votes will be counted within a “matter of days” of the election.
Harvie said he believes Bucks County votes will nearly all be counted by the Friday after election day.
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In the June primary – the first large election with expanded mail-in and absentee voting and new in-person voting machines – it took Bucks County about a week to tally all the votes.
According to the Pennsylvania Department of State, about 88,300 voters applied for mail-in or absentee ballots in the June primary.
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County officials have stated they purchased more equipment and fine-tuned their counting process using lessons learned from the June primary.
Bucks County Board of Elections Director Thomas Freitag his staff and those from other county departments have been working 12 to 15 hour days to deal with mail-in voting, on-demand voting, and preparing for in-person polling on election day.
“Everyone is motivated to get the job done and get it done right,” he said.
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