Westmoreland County counts mail-in ballots

Former Vice President Joe Biden picked up a net gain of 640 votes in Westmoreland County on Friday as a final batch of mail-in ballots were counted and added to the totals from Tuesday’s election.

County election officials spent the last two days reviewing as many as 4,000 ballots that had potential defects as well as 436 ballots deposited in a courthouse drop box prior to the 8 p.m. deadline on Election Day.

Those ballots were scanned and counted Friday, adding 2,616 ballots to the county’s totals.

The additional ballots drove up vote totals for both Biden and President Trump, who easily won a landslide victory among county voters.

Trump received about 64% of the more than 202,000 votes cast in the county through in-person voting or mail-in ballot before polls closed Nov. 3. Biden received 35% of the vote.

Biden more than doubled the votes the president received through mail-in ballots and, on Friday, added 1,628 votes to Trump’s 988.

Friday’s additional votes in Westmoreland came as counting of mail-in votes continued throughout the state and pushed Biden to overtake the president in the race to win Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes. By late afternoon, Biden extended his lead in Pennsylvania to more than 14,000.

“Our goal was never to win Westmoreland County. This is ‘Trump Country’ in Westmoreland County, but we had to do better than what we did in 2016,” Democratic Commissioner Gina Cerilli said.

Trump had a 31-point margin of victory in 2016. Biden cut into that margin by two percentage points this year, according to current vote totals.

And the count is continuing.

Elections Bureau Director JoAnn Sebastiani said another batch of ballots, postmarked by Nov. 3 but arriving at the courthouse after 8 p.m. on Election Day, are in limbo and might eventually be added to the county’s totals.

A state Supreme Court decision in late October upheld a ruling that allows counties to count those late arriving mail-in ballots, but state elections officials ordered those to be segregated and not yet counted while the legal battle proceeds.

Hundreds of ballots were delivered to the courthouse by the U.S. Postal Service minutes after Tuesday’s 8 p.m. deadline. Additional ballots arrived by mail at the courthouse over the next three days. Sebastiani said the total number of late-arriving mail-in votes is not expected to exceed 1,000.

County officials said the counting of about 3,600 provisional ballots will start Monday. Seven, four-member bipartisan boards convened Friday morning to review each of the paper ballots submitted by voters at the county’s 307 polling stations on Election Day. The time-consuming process to finish the mail-in vote count pushed the provisional boards’ work off until next week.

Provisional ballots are used when there are questions about a voter’s eligibility or in cases where a voter requested but did not receive a mail-in ballot.

A record number of provisional ballots were cast on Tuesday. Just 25 provisional ballots were cast during the 2016 presidential election in Westmoreland County. For this year’s primary, conducted in June when no-excuse mail-in ballots were allowed for the first time in Pennsylvania, the county received about 1,200 provisional ballots.

Commissioner Doug Chew said the counting of provisional ballots cannot begin until all mail-in ballots are counted.

Likewise across Pennsylvania, canvassing that in a normal year would have ended Friday but now will carry into next week, with many counties waiting until Monday to begin going through provisional ballots.

Tens of thousands of remaining mail-in ballots — as well as the provisional ballots and those cast by military and overseas voters — will decide whether Biden’s slim lead holds up or if Trump is able to make up the difference.

Allegheny County’s Return Board on Friday evening began counting 29,000 remaining ballots, a process they were not permitted to start until 5 p.m.

Those ballots — all received on or before Election Day — were part of an October printing mishap by Midwest Direct, the Ohio vendor with which the county contracted for ballot printing and mailing. New ballots were issued, but an agreement reached in court with some local Republican congressional candidates delayed their count.

Return Board members earlier in the day processed 2,200 ballots that would not scan. Another 4,000 ballots that had other issues, such as damage or missing dates, were also processed.