Westmoreland County officials defend voting machine accuracy as most results approved

Westmoreland County’s Election Board on Tuesday issued a precertification of results for most races that appeared on this month’s presidential election ballots.

The board approved final tallies for all but the race for U.S. Senate, in which a statewide recount was ordered as Republican Dave McCormick continues to hold a small lead over three-term Democratic incumbent Bob Casey. A final certification vote was set for Nov. 25.

The county will start the recount for the senate race Wednesday, said Election Bureau Director Greg McCloskey.

The recount is expected to take about two days as workers use two rented counting machines to tally votes cast on election day. Those include votes recorded using the county’s touch screen ballot marking devices and about 55,000 mail-in ballots received at the courthouse prior to polls closing on Nov. 5.

Officials said the $35,000 price tag to rent new counting machines will be reimbursed by the state.

Meanwhile, county commissioners acting as the elections board were again lobbied to abandon the computer touch screen voting machines used since 2020.

Mary Turka, a judge of elections in North Huntingdon, claimed voters waited in lines of up to two hours Election Day at her precinct because machines experienced repeated calibration errors that flipped votes to Democratic candidates.

Susanna DeJeet of Delmont presented commissioners with petitions she previously said were signed by more than 1,800 voters asking the county to use hand-marked paper ballots in future elections rather that touch screen computers.

“They are faulty and they don’t work,” DeJeet said of the touch screen computers.

McCloskey said there is no evidence any of the county’s more than 900 touch screen voting machines flipped votes or were incorrectly calibrated. Election officials conducted a week of calibration tests on each machine ahead of this month’s election, he said.

“There were numerous complaints, and we tried to replicate what they were claiming and every time we chalked it up to human error,” McCloskey said. “Each time we had a complaint we sent a tech out, and they couldn’t get it to replicate an error.”

Officials this year redesigned the ballot to remove small on-screen boxes that, for the last several elections, appeared in the upper corner of the line where a candidate’s name appeared. McCloskey said the box was only a design element and not intended to be specifically used to lodge a vote, but in past elections its presence may have confused voters.

Those boxes were excluded from this year’s ballots.

He suggested voter dexterity issues, such as touching the screen in the wrong location, likely led to the unproven appearance of calibration errors.