Technical issue, ballot reviews cause reporting delay of Westmoreland election results

It took more than 22 hours after Westmoreland County polls closed Tuesday night before complete unofficial results from the hundreds of primary races were posted to the county’s website.

Updated results to reflect totals from all 307 precincts and the nearly 13,000 mail-in ballots that arrived at the courthouse by Tuesday evening finally were added to tallies shortly after 5:30 p.m. Wednesday. Results had last been posted in the early morning hours listing totals from 288 precincts.

Officials said a technical issue mislabeled results to appear as if precincts were missing when the totals posted actually reflected the votes from all county voting precincts.

“There was an issue. It’s just a problem with the communication between two (computer) systems,” said Election Bureau Director JoAnn Sebastiani.

She also attributed the reporting delay to “routine” checks conducted Wednesday of mail-in ballots from 12 Penn Township precincts. She did not say what prompted those reviews.

County officials this week said final unofficial results were expected to be reported before sunrise Wednesday, but the large number of primary races that included hundreds of candidates on separate Republican and Democratic ballots muddled the reporting process.

It took several days after last November’s presidential election to count nearly 60,000 mail-in ballots.

For the primary, the counting process mostly was completed before the polls closed Tuesday.

Results from an initial batch of mail-in ballots were reported shortly after 10 p.m. Tuesday, with the remainder filtering in through the day Wednesday.

Sebastiani said ballots with minor deficiencies had to be ruled on by county commissioners, acting as the elections board, and led to some mail-in ballots not being counted until Wednesday.

Another 189 mail-in ballots from four Mt. Pleasant precincts were sequestered and counted separately Wednesday. Revised ballots had to be issued to voters to include the primaries for a contested district judge race that did not appear on the first set of ballots mailed out last month.

“It was a hard election for the presidential race last fall, but this one was harder because there are multiple ballots,” Sebastiani said.

Provisional ballots and write-in votes have yet to be counted. Those totals are expected to be completed by June 2, when the elections board is scheduled to meet to certify the primary results.