Luzerne County election count continues

Cheers erupted in a bustling Luzerne County Courtroom shortly before 3 p.m. Wednesday when Information Technology Director Mauro DiMauro announced the group had surpassed the halfway mark processing 40,030 mail-in primary election ballots.

It was the second day teams of workers from the election bureau and other departments had been methodically processing ballots needed to release complete election tallies.

Workers must open outer envelopes, shuffle the sealed secrecy envelopes inside and then open those to access ballots that have to be unfolded and smoothed so they don’t cause a jam when batches are fed into scanner/tabulators.

This opening couldn’t start until 7 a.m. on Election Day under state law and continued through 10 p.m. Tuesday, resuming from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Wednesday.

By Wednesday night, the teams got through 26,562, leaving 13,738 to process. County Manager C. David Pedri said he is optimistic the mail-in counting will be completed by early Friday.

The workers generally remained upbeat tackling the grueling mission, including one who had to cover a finger blister that emerged from repeated rubbing against a letter opener.

Wilkes-Barre resident Bob Caruso, who has been monitoring elections for 52 years, watched the scene from the observation area inside the county-owned Penn Place building in downtown Wilkes-Barre Wednesday.

He praised the county election bureau, DiMauro and other administrators for developing a secure system to “safely, honestly and accurately” process the historic volume of ballots stemming from 2019 state legislation that eliminated the requirement to provide an excuse or justification to vote by mail.

“It won’t be done fast, but it will be accurate,” Caruso said of the mail-in counting. “This has been a tremendous success story for Luzerne County.”

Turnout

At least 64,175 county Democrats and Republicans cast ballots in Tuesday’s primary, which equates to a turnout of 35%, according to analysis of statistics released Wednesday.

In addition to the mail-ins, approximately 24,145 voters cast ballots at the polls on Tuesday, officials said.

The total vote count will rise because this number does not include 1,859 provisional ballots that may or may not be accepted.

Provisional ballots are set aside for further review instead of being fed into a scanner/tabulator like the others cast at polling places.

As a safeguard, voters who had requested mail-in ballots were required to vote provisionally if they appeared at the polls so election officials could later verify they were not voting twice.

The county Election Board is set to meet Friday morning to determine which provisional ballots will be counted. Typically, the board has only a few provisional ballots to review, officials said.

Election Board Chairman Jose Adames won’t be participating in Friday’s official count because he resigned from the unpaid seat Wednesday, effective immediately, saying he has been assigned more responsibilities in his professional role as a senior recruiter.

Board Vice Chairman Peter Ouellette said the resignation won’t impact Friday’s count because he and the three other remaining board members will participate and constitute a required quorum.

Another view

Based on the numbers to date, about 63% of voters casting ballots chose the mail-in ballot option, which was intended for convenience but became heavily promoted as a way to avoid safety concerns as the coronavirus pandemic unfolded.

Without factoring in upcoming provisionals, turnout was 36% for Republicans and 33% for Democrats, the statistics show.

In total, 80,226 Republicans were registered to vote, and 29,078 cast ballots — 12,975 mail-in and 16,103 in person.

On the Democratic side, 35,097 of the 104,954 registered cast ballots — 27,055 mail-in and 8,042 in person.