The Centre County Republican Committee plans to file complaints against the county’s board of elections and demand a recount of mail-in ballots.
Centre County was delayed in counting ballots because of an Election Night bomb threat, and an overnight software issue. Election workers had to rescan more than 13,000 ballots after the county had problems uploading the scanned data to the elections software.
Michelle Schellberg is the chair of the Centre County Republican Committee. She spoke to the Board of Elections Thursday morning.
“The mail-in ballot count and chaos and total dysfunction is unacceptable," Schellberg said. And we expect there's going to need to be a recount of the mail-in ballots as a complete set.”
Both major parties had watchers present throughout the re-scanning process. The county released most mail-in ballot results Wednesday night. Election officials are still counting mail-in ballots with deficiencies, absentee ballots and overseas ballots.
Schellberg said she plans to file complaints on several other Election Day issues. She said some voting machines were not updated for Daylight Saving Time.
“Yeah, we're aware of that one," said Republican Steve Dershem, who is on the Board of Elections.
"I'd like to consider that this last minute decision to open a satellite office on campus might have been the cause to (Election Day issues), pulling resources from preparing for the election to that office instead of preparing machines with appropriate times for opening and things like that,” Schellberg said.
Schellberg, along with other poll watchers at the board meeting, also complained there were Democratic poll watchers on Election Day wearing lanyards showing their party affiliation. State law prohibits election officials and poll watchers from wearing campaign gear.
The Centre County Democratic Committee told WPSU they did not hand out lanyards to poll watchers.
