Westmoreland County ballot challenges to be heard Friday

Westmoreland commissioners will serve as the county’s elections board Friday to begin adjudication of challenges to mail-in and provisional ballots cast during the Nov. 3 election.

Commissioners spent Monday and Tuesday reviewing 816 mail-in ballots that arrived at the courthouse between 8 p.m. on Election Day and 5 p.m. Nov. 6 to determine if they meet the requirements to be considered legal votes.

County elections officials still must make a final determination on the status of 375 ballots delivered to the courthouse by the U.S. Postal Service nine minutes late on election night. Democrats have asked to include that pool of ballots with the current unofficial vote totals.

In an email sent Tuesday, U.S. Postal Service spokesman Tad Kelley said those ballots were collected by mail carriers on Election Day from surrounding post offices and were expedited to meet the 8 p.m. delivery deadline to the courthouse.

“Due to several factors, including unexpected congestion, the inability to safely park and secure the vehicle, health and security screening upon arrival at the courthouse, the employee arrived at 8:09 and delivered the ballots,” Kelley wrote.

Elections Bureau Director JoAnn Sebastiani said this week that attempts to have county workers walk the three blocks from the courthouse to the Greensburg post office on election night to pickup mail-in ballots was rebuffed.

Kelley said he was “unaware” of any requests from the county to pick up ballots.

State and federal courts are weighing whether mail-in ballots postmarked by Election Day but arriving during the following three days will be added to the state totals. State elections officials said those ballots must be segregated and not included in the unofficial counts.

Meanwhile, seven bipartisan boards continued Tuesday to slowly work through reviews of about 3,600 provisional paper ballots cast at the polls on Election Day.

Sebastiani said the provisional boards on Monday completed work on ballots from just 18 of the county’s 307 voting precincts. Officials could not say how many precincts were reviewed on Tuesday. No provisional ballots were counted or added to the unofficial results.

The courthouse is closed Wednesday for Veterans Day and the provisional boards will resume work on Thursday.