Counting of lost ballots underway in Westmoreland County

Westmoreland County elections officials Wednesday morning started counting more than two dozen provisional ballots cast in November but just recently discovered by staff during routine inspections of voting equipment.

Elections bureau staffers, serving as appointed members of a reconstituted provisional board, reviewed and qualified 20 ballots cast in North Huntingdon and one from Avonmore. Four ballots were rejected for being submitted by unregistered voters.

The North Huntingdon ballots, cast at the United Methodist Church on Coulterville Road, were discovered Dec. 28. Four additional ballots were found last week that were cast in Avonmore Borough, according to Elections Bureau Director JoAnn Sebastiani.

“They were inadvertently not reviewed (in November),” Sebastiani said of the Avonmore ballots.

The ballots that were declared legally cast will be counted as early as Thursday once staff retrieves a digital scanner device put into storage after the initial tallies were first completed in November.

The county’s elections board would then have to vote to accept the counted ballots and re-certify the updated results.

Officials said the found ballots will not change results that were certified last year. None of the races from those precincts could be altered by the additional votes, Sebastiani said.

Elections officials spent two weeks in November counting about 3,800 provisional ballots cast on Election Day.

The uncounted ballots from North Huntingdon were found stuffed under a touchscreen computer during routine inspections of the nearly 900 voting machines and 307 scanners placed throughout the county on Election Day. Those machines, along with 900 bins containing the more than 143,000 paper ballots cast at the precincts on Nov. 3, under the state’s election code, were required to remain under seal until Nov. 23.