Noteable: Beth Lechman confident county will be ready for voting changes, 2020 elections

As voters and candidates waited for days to get results of this month’s Iowa caucuses, Beth Lechman sat hundreds of miles away in her Westmoreland County home and imaged the nightmare that state’s elections officials were enduring.

It is one Lechman hopes to avoid in April, when Pennsylvania voters go to the polls for this year’s presidential primary election.

Lechman, 46, of Unity, is the county’s elections bureau director. Like her colleagues in Iowa, she will have to navigate new technology and new laws that impact local voters this spring.

“You know how that feels, and you never want to be the one under that microscope,” Lechman said of Iowa’s caucus confusion that saw the reporting of final results delayed for days because of technical failures. “I feel every election director goes through a fear of irreversible problems on Election Day.”

Lechman, who is married and the mother of two teens, holds a bachelor of science degree in Information Science from the University of Pittsburgh. She has served in county’s elections bureau since 2007, first as the department’s deputy director before taking over the office’s top job in 2015. She started her career with the county in 1997 as a computer technician who focused on software and hardware used by the elections bureau.

She was involved with the county’s transition in 2005 from old-fashioned lever voting machines that were used for a half century to the touch-screen computer system used to tabulate votes over the last 15 years.

This year, Lechman will oversee yet another change as voters will use a new system — one that will require selecting candidates on a computer, which will print a completed ballot that then will scanned at the polls.

“There’s an extreme amount of pressure to make sure nothing is missing and nothing gets messed up. We have to make sure all the new equipment is programmed properly and the technology works,” Lechman said.

County officials last year paid more than $7 million for the new voting system to meet a governor’s mandate that voting systems have a verifiable paper trail to ensure the vote count is accurate. Lechman spent last year finding new systems that met the governors’s mandate and hosted demonstrations from vendors, but it was the county commissioners who had the final say on what was purchased.

Commissioners said they are confident the county will be ready.

“There are a lot of changes coming to the election cycle this year. It’s tough to implement the new regulations, laws, new equipment and the high voter turnout for a presidential year. However, I am confident that Beth Lechman and our entire election bureau staff will be able to get the job done,” said Commissioner Gina Cerilli.

The new technology is only part of the changed equation for this year’s election. New laws that will allow ballots to be submitted via mail and tighter voter registration deadlines will add to the election season stress, Lechman said.

County elections officials will begin full-scale education programs, tutorials and training for voters, poll workers and elections bureau staff in the weeks ahead of the primary.

And Lechman and her staff will have a trial run, of sorts, next month. The new voting equipment will be first used in a special election on March 17 to fill a vacancy in the state House 58th District, which stretches from Monessen to Jeannette and contains 66 precincts.

“It will be very helpful for voters, poll workers, elections staff and technicians to use the new equipment on a small-scale election,” Lechman said.

Six weeks later, the entire county will participate in the primary.

The votes will be counted and results posted.

Then they’ll do it all over again in November.

“I do enjoy what I do, for the most part,” Lechman said. “I enjoy assisting the voters. I like to think I bring a non-biased, non-partisan process to the election process.”