Westmoreland County voters in November will be given the option to use paper ballots on Election Day.

Republican Commissioners Sean Kertes and Doug Chew on Tuesday, acting as the county’s Election Board, authorized an optional shift to paper ballots while also saying voters can still use the touch-screen voting machine system that has been in place since 2020.

“What it really came down to was all the other counties around us do this. We are following our neighbors. Voters will now have a choice to use one of our ballot markers if they want that option,” Kertes said.

Commissioners in 2019 purchased a $7 million voting system that included more than 900 touch-screen computers and hundreds of scanners that count ballots. Voters select candidates and mark ballots using a computer that generates a paper ballot that is scanned at the polls.

Under the revised Election Day process, voters will now have the pencil-and-paper option to mark their ballot before depositing it into a digital scanner.

For now, the paper ballot option is limited to the November election.

Election bureau Director Scott Ross said the county will pay about $40,000 to print 70,000 paper ballots, which will be distributed to all 306 voting precincts for the November election.

Commissioners said last spring they were presented with a petition signed by 5,000 voters asking for a shift to paper ballots, claiming the touch-screen voting system currently in use was vulnerable to potential fraud and unreliable.

A similar request was made during a public meeting in August 2024, asking that paper ballots be used for a presidential election to protect against voter fraud, but no change was implemented. County officials said a switch at that time to paper ballots would have cost as much as $250,000 because of the large number of ballots needed for the high-volume election.

Both Kertes and Chew said Tuesday that fear of voter fraud was not a factor in expanding Election Day options this fall.

Kertes suggested the decision was more about bringing Westmoreland County in line with what is available to voters in other counties.

Allegheny County Elections Director David Voye said voters use the same equipment in place in Westmoreland. Computerized ballot markers primarily are used to meet requirements under the Americans with Disabilities Act, while paper ballots are utilized by most voters, he said in an email.

Chew said Westmoreland County voters want the paper ballot option.

“I did give credence to the 5,000 people who requested this in the spring,” Chew said.

Commissioner Ted Kopas, a Democrat, voted against the paper ballot proposal.

“It’s a colossal waste of money that we don’t have,” Kopas said. “I don’t know if this is being done to pacify a certain group, but in some way it gives validation to unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud.”

Ross said the change to paper ballots is not expected to impact Election Day operations and ballot counting. He said the county will continue to process results from data manually brought into the courthouse from the voting precincts. There will be no reduction of ballot marking devices sent to the polls, he said.

In addition to the paper ballots placed at the polls, the county still intends to print about 28,000 ballots for mail-in voting. Those ballots are expected to be available in October.

Copyright ©2025— Trib Total Media, LLC (TribLIVE.com)