A bureaucratic mixup in Chester County resulted in tens and thousands of unaffiliated voters being left off of the official voter rolls.
When county officials printed the pollbooks that poll workers used to verify voters, they admitted to not including anyone who was outside of the two major political parties.
Al Schmidt, Secretary of Commonwealth, said that this is a practice that some counties use correctly in primary elections. Independent voters are not allowed to vote in Pennsylvania’s primaries. It appears Chester only included the major parties in its pollbook.
Due to the error, 75,000 unaffiliated and third party voters had been left out of the voter rolls. This forced many people to use provisional ballots. Chester County collected over 12,100 provisional ballots by Thursday. This is a huge jump compared to the 843 in 2023, and only 626 in 2020.
Chester County, unlike other Pennsylvania counties which use electronic voting books, still uses paper pollbooks. The error was found early on Tuesday. Officials scrambled, printing and delivering new pollbooks for all 230 precincts. This process took until about 3:45 pm to complete.
Rebecca Brain, county spokesperson, said on Wednesday that the results of all ballots, including provisional, will be analyzed to determine how and why it happened.
Chester, according to the election manager in Allegheny County David Voye, skipped this step.
Schmidt stated that Delaware and Philadelphia counties supplied extra provisional envelopes for Chester to keep up with its rush. These can’t printed on demand.
Last year, during the presidential election, only 3,454 ballots were provisional, which is less than one-third of what was cast this year. The official announcement is that the ballot count will start Friday and last 12 hours per day, until all votes are processed.
