Luzerne County mail-in ballots to be sent soon

Mail-in ballots for the Nov. 3 general election are on track to be mailed by the end of the month to Luzerne County voters who requested them, county Election Director Shelby Watchilla said Thursday.

The county could not proceed until the state granted final approval of the candidate list, which occurred Thursday afternoon, Watchilla said.

Her office is now undergoing several rounds of ballot proofing.

The county administration has decided to retain an outside company to handle the preparation and mailing of ballots instead of performing that work in-house, county Administrative Services Director David Parsnik said Thursday.

Ohio-based Election IQ was selected to perform the work, which also includes printing the ballots. At least five companies submitted proposals in response to the county’s public request, and Election IQ provided the best price for the package, Parsnik said.

The company will charge $1.28 per mail-in ballot, which covers all services except for postage, he said, noting the expense will be paid with coronavirus relief funding.

The county must pay for postage to mail the ballots to voters, while the state is picking up the postage tab for voters to send back their completed ballots.

Election IQ has experience and has worked with the county’s voting system supplier, Dominion Voting Systems Inc., Parsnik said.

The ballots will be sent in envelopes containing the county’s mailing address based on a list of approved mail-in ballot applicants the county has entered into the state’s election database, Parsnik said. The company must provide the county with access to a system that tracks the mailing status of each ballot request.

In addition to selecting the correct ballot for the voter’s geographic location, Election IQ must include a privacy security envelope in the package sent to voters and add a label used to track which voters return ballots.

The company will be paid based on the number of ballots sent, which the county is projecting could be in the 50,000 range, Parsnik said.

Approximately 40,300 county voters cast their ballots by mail on June 2 — an option that was encouraged in the coronavirus pandemic and available with no excuse or reason required for the first time due to state legislation that had passed last year.

Only one valid ballot can be issued to each voter, tracked through a unique barcode.

Parsnik said the outsourcing will free up election staff for other election preparations.

The county election office will continue handling the processing of all returned ballots.

It’s still unclear if state officials will permit counties to open the envelopes sooner as requested by the county election board and some county officials, Watchilla said.

Teams of county workers had to spend days opening outer envelopes, shuffling the sealed secrecy envelopes inside and then opening those to access mail-in ballots that had to be unfolded and smoothed so they didn’t cause a jam when batches were fed into scanner/tabulators. These envelopes couldn’t be opened until 7 a.m. on Election Day under state law.

In the primary, completed ballots had to be physically returned to the county election bureau by 8 p.m. on Election Day, and postmarks did not count.

That has changed for the general election. The state Supreme Court on Thursday granted the Democratic Party’s request to order a three-day extension, which means mailed ballots received by 5 p.m. Nov. 6 must be counted if they were postmarked by the time polls closed on Election Day.

This ruling also authorized counties to use drop boxes for mail-in ballots.