Republican congressional candidates denied tour of Allegheny County election warehouse

Attorneys for two Republican congressional candidates suing Allegheny County want to examine exactly how elections officials are managing nearly 29,000 incorrect ballots sent to voters.

The federal lawsuit, filed by Sean Parnell, who is running against U.S. Rep. Conor Lamb, D-Mt. Lebanon, and Luke Negron, who is running against U.S. Rep. Mike Doyle, D-Forest Hills, also challenged the county over their right to have poll watchers at the county’s eight satellite election offices.

The two sides had a conference on Wednesday to try to work out some of the issues but were unsuccessful.

Allegheny County last week announced that 28,869 voters received the wrong ballot because of an error by the company contracted to handle the printing and mailing. The lawsuit by Parnell and Negron questions how, exactly, the county’s elections division is handling both the incorrect ballots and the new ones sent to voters.

The county said in a court filing on Thursday that there is a practice of “sorting, segregating and preserving” both the incorrect and the correct ballots it has received from those have already mailed them in. They are maintained “within a separately designated portion of the locked ballot room.”

“When I’m able to go see that, I’ll believe it,” said attorney Thomas W. King III, who filed the lawsuit on behalf of Parnell and Negron.

He said he has asked the county to allow him to tour the North Side warehouse used for election returns, but was denied.

In its court filing, the county said that it offered to provide photographs from multiple angles to depict the space, but that a tour is not reasonable given the short time before the Nov. 3 election. Offering a tour, they said, would mean inviting all candidates listed on Allegheny County ballots.

“Any tour or inspection of the facility would require the cessation of ballot scanning and sorting so that all ballots could be secured during such a tour or inspection,” the county said. “Arranging facility tours or inspections for all candidates less than two weeks before the election, and ceasing the scanning and sorting activities during such times, would delay the necessary work required to timely pre-canvass and canvass all ballots, and create an unreasonable hardship on defendants.”

King said that he does not believe all candidates would need to be offered a tour — since only two are party to the current lawsuit. He said he also offered to take such a tour at any time of the day or night, and with any required security at the facility, to avoid having to shut down the work occurring there.

“The idea was to see them, see how they’re situated,” King said. “We want to assure ourselves, we want to assure the public, these ballots are being properly handled, and they’re secure.”

On Wednesday, the state said that it had, for the first time, eclipsed 9 million registered voters. It had approved applications for nearly 2.9 million mail-in ballots — with 1.8 million of those coming from Democrats and 714,079 from Republicans.

In Allegheny County, according to the elections division, as of Wednesday, 387,735 mail-in, absentee, overseas and military ballot applications have been approved. Of those, 224,903 have been returned.

Nearly 77% of those that have been returned came from Democrats, the county said.

The plaintiffs have asked that no ballots — whether received by mail or dropped at a satellite office — be touched, sorted or scanned in any way other than to be stored until Election Day.

However, Allegheny County said that their proposal would result in the delay of counting votes that “would extend for multiple days and possibly over a week, thus creating uncertainty and concern over the results of all races on the ballot.”

As for the nearly 29,000 ballots printed in error, the plaintiffs have asked for an accounting of all of them, including the name, address and voting district of each voter who received one.

U.S. District Judge J. Nicholas Ranjan has scheduled a hearing on the ballot issue for Tuesday.

He is expected to issue an order on the poll watchers matter before this weekend — which is the last that the satellite offices will be open. (Four satellite offices and the County Office Building location Downtown will be open.)

The county has said that the satellite offices are in public buildings and anyone is permitted inside, provided they follow masking rules and don’t interfere with members of the public or the processing of applications.

The plaintiffs said that’s not good enough. Poll watchers, they said in their complaint, are permitted to keep a list of voters and may challenge anyone making application to vote and ask for proof of qualifications.

Later on Thursday, several groups and candidates filed motions seeking to intervene in the case or file friend-of-the-court briefs.

They include the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and U.S. Rep. Conor Lamb, D-Mt. Lebanon; the Pennsylvania Democratic Party and state Reps. Austin Davis, Dan Frankel and Ed Gainey; as well as the American Civil Liberties Union; Common Cause Pennsylvania and the Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

In their brief, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee said that the plaintiffs suggestion for holding the ballots mailed in error “not only violates state law, it tramples the constitutional rights of voters and improperly injects this court into election administration decisions that state officials are better equipped to make.”

Further, they wrote, it will significantly delay election results. Already, it is expected that Pennsylvania’s results will take several days.

The committee also said in its brief that there is no right to poll watch in satellite offices in Pennsylvania under either state or federal law.

In their brief, the state Democratic party wrote that they have a right to intervene to protect the interests of their candidates.

“Here, plaintiffs seek to invalidate procedures of the commonwealth’s vote-by-mail program based on an alleged and speculative fear of voter fraud without any evidence of any wide-spread fraud.”