Voter turnout at 36% in Westmoreland County; elections board reviews problem ballots

More than 88,000 registered voters in Westmoreland County cast ballots in last week’s general election as turnout for the municipal races neared 36%, officials said.

That figure exceeded the predicted turnout of 30% and represented 22,000 more ballots than were cast during a similar election cycle in 2017.

This fall’s higher-than- expected turnout came during the second general election conducted under rules that expanded the use of mail-in ballots as the region continued to struggle with the coronavirus pandemic.

Nearly 17,000 of the more than 23,600 mail-in ballots sent out to voters were returned, said Greg McCloskey, acting election bureau director. About 200 of those ballots were suspected as defective and were not counted, a substantial decrease from a year ago when about 4,000 defective mail-in ballots — from the nearly 60,000 that were returned by voters — were initially stricken.

On Monday, Westmoreland commissioners, acting as the county’s elections board, ruled 40 of the potentially problematic ballots returned this year that contained minor errors could be counted.

Ballots with illegible or no signatures from voters and those that were not dated or were returned without secrecy envelopes were rejected.

In several cases, commissioners rejected ballots returned by husbands and wives who erroneously signed each others’ ballots.

“We want to count every vote, but the rules have to be followed,” Commissioner Sean Kertes said.

Each questioned ballot was reviewed independently by all three commissioners. In some cases, commissioners ruled attempts to fix minor mistakes were enough to allow those votes to be counted.

Mail-in ballots hand-delivered prior to Nov. 2 were reviewed briefly by election bureaus staffers who allowed minor defects to be cured, McCloskey said. No ballots sent in by mail or returned in local drop boxes were reviewed prior to the counting process, he said.

Last week’s election saw far fewer ballots cast than in the 2020 presidential election, in which turnout topped 81% and more than 206,000 votes were cast. Election workers spent a week reviewing and counting more than 3,500 provisional ballots cast at the polls a year ago.

Just 214 provisional ballots were cast last week, McCloskey said.