At 40% participation, Tuesday's primary turnout exceeded Allegheny County's expectations

Forty percent of Allegheny County’s registered Democrats and Republicans voted in Tuesday’s primary election, one of the highest turnouts for a primary in recent years and one that exceeded county expectations, officials said Wednesday.

A little more than 311,000 of Allegheny County’s 770,000 registered Democrats and Republicans voted, according to Allegheny County spokeswoman Amie Downs. It included close to 210,000 votes cast by mail-in or absentee ballots. The remaining ballots, about 101,000, were cast at polling places.

“It was a busy, busy election with all this paper coming in, (ballot) applications every day,” said Elections Division Manager David Voye. “We had three shifts of county employees working 24 hours a day to get ballots out in the mail. It was very strenuous, very busy, but I think it turned out well.”

Voye originally predicted 22%, a number more typical of Western Pennsylvania primaries. He based that prediction on turnout during the 2012 presidential primary when President Obama was seeking reelection.

Instead, it equaled that of presidential primaries in 2008 and 2016 when Obama and President Trump, respectively, were seeking a nomination for the first time.

Gov. Wolf pushed the Pennsylvania primary originally scheduled for April back to June 2 and Allegheny County consolidated polling places because of the coronavirus pandemic.

November election: Back to normal?

Downs said residents would likely return to their regular polling places for the November election unless the state again permits counties to consolidate up to 60% of polls.

“Consolidation is only applied to this election by state law,” she said.

The county finished scanning and tabulating results around 2 p.m. Wednesday but it still has considerable work to do as ballots continue filtering in.

Gov. Tom Wolf issued an executive order Monday extending the deadline for Allegheny and five other counties to receive mail-in and absentee ballots by mail. They will be accepted through 5 p.m. June 9, as long as they were postmarked by election day.

Counties have until June 22 to certify election results.

“I’m sure we’re going to set up a process where we’ll do them all at one time and it will be open to any candidates who will be asking to watch,” Voye said.

He said mail-in ballots permitted for a first time in Pennsylvania during this primary delayed the results. Ballots were in envelopes that were placed in a second “secrecy” envelope.

“It was physically opening and extracting the secrecy envelopes and extracting the ballots from the absentee and mail-in envelopes,” he said, adding that some ballots also jammed in scanners because of folds. “That’s a very manual and time-consuming process. That took longer than expected.”

Workers scanned and counted all absentee and mail-in ballots and those cast in about 62% of the county’s 1,323 polling places by 2:30 a.m. Tuesday. On Wednesday, they finished counting ballots from about 500 outstanding polls.

He said the county would likely return to scanning ballots at polling places in November. He also plans to add election workers.

“I think we’ll need to throw more people at it,” he said. “We’ll start earlier, at least have more people and more shifts, and maybe work through the night.”