Westmoreland County extends primary election certification deadline another week

Certification of Westmoreland County’s election results from the June 2 primary will be delayed one week, officials said Wednesday.

Additional time is needed to ensure every ballot cast this month has been accounted for and properly counted, a process that will require more time than initially was planned, Elections Bureau Director Beth Lechman said.

“Due to the new equipment and new poll workers, we want to verify we didn’t miss any supplies and ballots,” Lechman said.

Nearly 84,000 ballots were cast during the primary. The initial counting of votes took about three days as Elections Bureau staffers culled through 40,000 ballots submitted by mail and another 1,200 provisional ballots filled out at the polls on Election Day. Provisional ballots were not scanned nor were they initially tallied along with the votes cast at 307 precincts. All votes cast using touchscreen voting machines and digitally scanned at the precincts were counted after polls closed June 2.

Precertification of the results, which had been set for Wednesday, was pushed back to June 24. The delay will allow Elections Bureau workers to inspect digital scanners, where every ballot cast on Election Day on new voting machines have been stored in locked containers.

Lechman said state law does not allow those storage containers to be opened until 20 days after an election.

“We just want to open them up to see if there are any (provisional) ballots that shouldn’t be there,” Lechman said.

None of the major races in the primary were contested in Westmoreland County.

Write-in votes cast in the major races still are being tabulated, and the county’s election board is scheduled to rule next week on their admissibility.

Westmoreland commissioners, who also serve as the county’s elections board, on Wednesday disqualified hundreds of write-in votes cast in down-ballot races for local seats on the Republican Party committee. Those disqualified votes were cast for candidates who were ineligible to serve because they did not meet residential requirements for districts where they received votes, Lechman said.

Committee races in about half of the 307 districts ended in ties with write-in candidates receiving just one or two votes. Lechman said ties will be broken Friday at the courthouse through a random drawing of lots.