HARRISBURG — The 2020 presidential election was the first major test for no-excuse mail voting in Pennsylvania.
The process was new to election workers, and on top of that, participation in mail voting was particularly high due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Add to that the state’s rules for “precanvassing” mail ballots, and the commonwealth was uniquely poised to produce slow returns.
Former President Donald Trump seized on the delay, baselessly alleging it was a sign of mass fraud — a claim that caught on among his supporters. Election officials are wary of that destabilizing disinformation making a return this year.
“It’s obviously a concern,” Secretary of State Al Schmidt said in an interview with CNN. “That period of uncertainty is something that is exploited by bad-faith actors to undermine the confidence in the outcome.”
Ask election directors across Pennsylvania how to improve the voting process and they’ll all say the same thing: Let counties start precanvassing absentee and mail ballots before Election Day.
The term broadly refers to the processing steps that prepare ballots submitted before Election Day for tabulation. These steps can include checking signatures and dates, opening envelopes, stacking ballots, and scanning them through ballot-counting machines. It does not include having the ballot-counting machines generate a vote count.
Pennsylvania is one of seven states that does not allow election workers to begin processing absentee or mail ballots until 7 a.m. on Election Day. This means workers across the commonwealth must deal with these ballots at the same time the polls are open, functionally running two elections at once, which can cause delays in unofficial results being available.
Much has changed since 2020. County election directors have more experience with the state’s mail voting law, passed in 2019. Counties have also received millions of dollars to supplement their election budgets from a state-funded grant program. Those dollars have been used, in some cases, to purchase machines to more quickly open and sort mail ballots.
But the state legislature and governor have yet to agree on a bill that would give workers more time to process ballots — with Republicans insisting that such a policy be tied to expanded voter ID requirements, and Democrats so far balking at that deal.
As a result, election workers will still be operating under a tight timeline on Nov. 5.
What is precanvassing?
State law defines precanvass as the “inspection and opening of all envelopes containing official absentee ballots or mail-in ballots, the removal of such ballots from the envelopes, and the counting, computing, and tallying of the votes reflected on the ballots.”
Forty-three states allow the processing of ballots before Election Day. Twelve of those states also allow workers to tally the votes before Election Day, but most have strict penalties against releasing results early. There are also outliers — Connecticut, for instance, leaves these decisions up to local officials.
Processing mail ballots is labor intensive, and election directors across the state say that being able to do at least some of the work before Election Day would make things run much more smoothly on the day itself.
Voters return absentee and mail ballots in two envelopes: an inner secrecy envelope, which is used for privacy, and an outer envelope that is signed and dated.
Election workers have to verify that the outer envelope is signed and dated, open both envelopes to retrieve the ballot, and prepare it to be counted by unfolding and flattening out the ballot. That process can take several minutes per ballot.
“It’s like we’re running an entire second election in parallel with in-person voting while the polls are open,” said Lycoming County election director Forrest Lehman. “Counties, no matter their size, all have the same problem if we're having to run a precanvassing operation in parallel with Election Day operations. It's a strain on our resources, our staffing.”
Proposals aimed at solving this problem range in their approach. One bill would permit opening and sorting ballots five days before the election, while another would allow for three weeks.
What has the legislature done since 2020?
Since Democrats gained a majority in the state House in 2022, they have passed a host of legislation to reform voting, including a bill that would permit poll workers to begin precanvassing a week before Election Day.
An earlier version of the bill included specifications regarding which actions constituted precanvassing. It detailed how election workers could prepare ballots by unfolding and straightening them and permitted scanning ballots but did not allow the tabulation of results. However, the final bill that passed the state House floor did not include those details.
State Rep. Scott Conklin (D., Centre), the bill’s prime sponsor, said that was done on purpose, in consultation with the County Commissioners Association of Pennsylvania, to allow each election director the freedom to implement precanvassing in a way that works best for their county.
For example, some counties might simply open envelopes and sort ballots. Others could also scan those ballots.
At the moment, precanvassing, as defined by the Election Code, does not include the recording or publishing of votes. Functionally, this means that while poll workers can scan ballots into machines that tally votes, they are not allowed to have the machine generate results and show the vote total until 8 p.m. when the polls close.
“We didn’t want to get hung up in the minutia,” Conklin said of defining precanvassing. He called the bill “a Christmas tree with no lights on it,” saying he designed bare-bones language to pass through the legislature without controversy.
However, only Democrats voted in favor of the bill in the state House, and the Republican-controlled state Senate has not taken it up.
“I promised the county commissioners I would give them a clean bill, which I thought that — in all honesty — would pass easily. And to my shock, it was straight party lines,” Conklin told Spotlight PA.
Republican leaders in the state Senate say the primary reason for their opposition is the same as it has been for years. As Majority Leader Joe Pittman told the Capital-Star in September, “Any discussions of changes to the administration of elections in our commonwealth must also include a constitutional voter identification requirement.”
Pennsylvanians are required to bring proof of identification if they are voting at a polling place for the first time. Acceptable forms include government-issued identification as well as utility bills or bank statements. However, legislative Republicans have sought to mandate that all voters provide identification each time they cast a ballot.
That requirement was included in a Republican-authored bill that also sought to expand precanvassing; it passed in 2021, when the GOP controlled both the state House and Senate. Then-Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, vetoed it partly because of the ID provision, saying, “This bill is ultimately not about improving access to voting or election security, but about restricting the freedom to vote.”
The current Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro, departed from that stance during his campaign, signaling that he would be open to expanding voter ID requirements.
In the past, some GOP lawmakers have also been skeptical of extending precanvassing because they thought it might lead to results being wrongly released early and influencing voters.