A judge ordered the Erie County Board of Elections to extend its hours and take other steps to ensure that thousands of voters who requested but did not receive absentee ballots can still receive absentee ballots and return them before the deadline on elections.
The judge’s order came after the Pennsylvania Democratic Party sued the county in an attempt to get officials to remedy the problems.
“That’s why we went to court this week to make sure these voters have a chance to vote; and we won,” a senior Harris campaign official said Friday on a call with reporters. “Erie is now expanding weekend hours for local voters and making ballots available to voters who may be out of state. “We would certainly like these mistakes to not happen, but in a country where elections are administered at local level and has almost 200,000 constituencies, isolated incidents are inevitable.”
The Democratic Party filed the lawsuit Wednesday with support from Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign, and the Pennsylvania Republican Party was added as an intervener on Thursday.
Erie Common Pleas Court Judge David Ridge ordered the board of elections to remain open over the weekend on Saturday and Sunday from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., and on Monday from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.
The problems in Erie began with an Ohio-based third-party vendor, ElectionIQ, the contractor that prints and mails the county’s ballots.
The cause was a software failure ElectionIQ to send duplicate ballots which went into the wrong envelopes, with some voters receiving other voters’ envelopes. According to the lawsuit, the U.S. Postal Service said it was “unable to account” for another 1,800 absentee ballots that the county said were never mailed by ElectionIQ.
The lawsuit alleged that absentee ballot returns in Erie were lower than the statewide average, and only about 52% of voters who requested absentee ballots received them by Oct. 28. Statewide, the return rate is 67%.
Friday’s hearing in Erie found that “at least 365 duplicate ballots were mailed to voters that included an absentee ballot with a barcode that matched a different voter.” Between 13,000 and 17,000 voters in Erie County who requested an absentee ballot still have not received one, and about 1,200 voters who temporarily live out of state, such as college students, also have not received ballots.
In addition to the extended hours, the judge ordered the board of elections to add another printer in its office and allow voters who applied for an absentee ballot to cancel their application, immediately receive a recent absentee ballot and cast that ballot – on the ballot in one of the two drop boxes at the Erie County Courthouse.
The board of elections must ensure that a sufficient number of ballots and provisional ballots are available at all Erie County polling places and must make available the names and email addresses of out-of-state voters who are still awaiting absentee ballots for the party, and in some cases cases, apply an overnight delivery service to send replacement ballots to out-of-state voters.
The Electoral Commission was also ordered to contact all voters who received a duplicate ballot and all voters whose name appeared on a duplicate ballot intended for another voter to invalidate the previous ballot and submit a recent one. All of these votes are to be separated to give officials time to verify that the ballots are right.
Erie is considered a key battleground county in Pennsylvania, with the 19 electoral votes needed for either side to win the presidency. Former President Donald Trump, the Republican Party’s presidential nominee, defeated Hillary Clinton in Erie County in 2016. just over 1,900 votes. But Democrats appear to have learned from their 2016 defeat; Joe Biden defeated Trump in Erie in the 2020 election o a margin of just over 1,400 votes, or 1.03% when Pennsylvania turned blue again.
Top candidates in both parties — Vice President Kamala Harris, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance (Ohio) and Trump — have all campaigned in Erie during the current election cycle.
