Pollbook error could force 1000s of Chester County voters to cast provisional ballots:
Election Day pollbooks in Pennsylvania’s Chester County omitted the names of third-party voters, which could force up to tens of thousands of people there to cast provisional ballots in Tuesday’s municipal elections.
Pollbooks are the lists of registered voters that pollworkers use to check in voters at the polling place. The county said it is sending supplemental pollbooks to its 230 polling places, but until they arrive, it said, registered voters whose names aren’t in the pollbook will have to cast provisional ballots or come back later.
“Chester County Voter Services will conduct a formal review to determine how third-party registered voters were omitted from the poll books and will take action to ensure this error does not occur again,” the county said in a statement.
There are roughly 75,000 third-party or unaffiliated voters registered in Chester County.
Here is what voters using a provisional ballot need to know:
Provisional voting carries more risk of rejection
When a regular ballot is voted at a polling place, it is fed into the precinct’s tabulator and retained in the ballot box; once the tabulator accepts it, that is the end of the voter’s interaction with the ballot. At that point, the voter’s selections cannot be removed from the final count.
But for provisional ballots, there are additional steps that must occur before the ballot is counted.
Provisional ballots are a failsafe voting method intended when there is some question about a voter’s eligibility, and there are additional steps the voter and election officials must properly execute for the ballot to be counted.
Voters must place their provisional ballot in a secrecy envelope, and then place that envelope in an outer envelope. The outer envelope includes several fields that must be filled out by the voter and election official. --->READ MORE HERE
Chester County PA Poll Books Missing Names Of 75,000 Voters In Election Day Error:
It means independent and unaffiliated voters must cast provisional ballots for now.
Some 75,000 registered voters walking into polling places in Chester County, Pennsylvania will not find their name in the polling book.
The names of registered Republicans and Democrats appear, but the independent and unaffiliated voters did not make the book. It means they all must cast provisional ballots for now. The county is working on the problem.
Chester County Voter Services posted on its website a bold, red-letter message at the top of its website, “We are working to get supplemental poll books to every polling place. Until that time, any registered voter who is not listed in the pollbook can vote provisionally.”
But if the county ends up using two poll books at all its polling places, one it started the morning with and the other that includes the missing voters, it is going to be tough to reconcile the number of voters to ballots cast at the end of the day.
Pennsylvania asks voters to show identification only the first time they vote at a new polling place. Voters then sign a poll book. The next time they vote, no ID is needed. Instead, voters sign next to last year’s signature, which poll workers find in the poll book. In this case, they do not appear in the poll books at all.
It is unclear how it happened. One theory is that the county election workers may have used a primacy poll book for the general election. --->READ MORE HERE
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