Election boards in almost all of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties are gearing up for a monumental task.
Sixty-four of them applied for and received a share of $45 million in new state grant money. The cash pool is designed to cover nine different types of election costs counties have had to bear by themselves for decades. Think staff salaries, ballot printing, and postage.
The grant amounts are based on how many registered voters a county will have to serve in this year’s midterms and next year’s primary – giving election boards a substantial cash boost. Philadelphia County got a $5.4 million cut. Forest County in northwest Pennsylvania got a little over $17,000.
But there’s a catch: county boards will have to prove that their workers processed and counted all mail-in ballots starting on the Nov. 8 election day without stopping – or they’ll forfeit the money. The state could also claw back that money if boards fail to post their progress online by midnight that evening.
The trouble is, tens of thousands of early ballots may have piled up by Election Day in some places – and state law prevents election workers from getting started on the process until 7 a.m. that day.
“It’s going to be a long day for everyone involved, but we’re going to do our best to follow the law as it is,” Berks County Public Relations Office Stephanie Weaver said. “We’re going to make sure that happens one way or another.”
For the most part, counties say they’re ready to tackle the requirements. Some have even held vote counting marathons in past elections.
Berks, Allegheny, Montgomery are all hiring extra workers – from a few dozen to as many as 100 – whose only job will be to process and count mail-in ballots using scanning equipment. Each of those counties have been marathoning their counts since 2020, when voters were first allowed to cast a mail ballot without an excuse.
“In this past primary, we opened and counted a little over 90,000 ballots,”Allegheny County Elections Division Manager David Voye said. “We’re not allowed to provide results until after 8 p.m., but I believe the counting was done by 2 [p.m.]”
