Allegheny County Elections Manager David Voye said Monday that the April primary election was “the calm before the storm” of the upcoming November general election, as low turnout and few issues at the polls marked a quiet day for county election workers.
Mr. Voye told the county’s Board of Elections — consisting of county Executive Sara Innamorato, and at-large County Council members Sam DeMarco and Bethany Hallam — that turnout for the primary was finalized at 27% or 28%. That’s the lowest turnout for a congressional primary since 2018, when 19.11% of voters cast a ballot.
Ms. Hallam asked that the Board of Elections meet earlier than previously scheduled before the general election in order to talk about ballot return sites for mail-in ballots and other logistics for the general election. The other members were agreeable, and Mr. DeMarco asked that county election officials work to livestream ballot tabulation and counting in the Board of Elections’ warehouse on the North Side, so that candidates and other interested parties can observe without having to be present.
He added that the public needs to be considerate of the fact that county election workers counting the ballots need room to do their jobs. There is a balance between ensuring election integrity and impeding the work that those people do, he said.
“We want to provide the greatest degree of transparency that we can, but we ask for your understanding as well, from a logistical perspective … on what’s actually doable,” Mr. DeMarco said.
The board certified the primary election results Monday morning. Mr. Voye said there were roughly 245,000 ballots cast during the primary last month. Of those, about 95,765 were mail-in ballots, and 145,000 people voted in-person, he said.
There were 1,521 provisional ballots cast, and 482 were not counted because the voter was not registered or not registered in the party’s primary that they wanted to vote in, Mr. Voye said.
Chet Harhut, deputy manager of the county’s division of elections, said that 1,177 mail-in ballots came in late after Election Day, and weren’t counted. A majority of them came a day or two after Election Day, he said.
Many public commenters, both in-person and by email, commended the county’s ballot drop-off sites, where voters could go to hand deliver their mail-in ballot to a county worker before Election Day. Ms. Innamorato asked how county officials would use this primary election and prior elections to determine where to locate drop-off sites in November and the future.
Jessica Garofolo, director of the county’s department of administrative services, said she and other county officials are looking at where there might be more returns of mail-in ballots. Six ballot drop-off locations were available to voters during the primary.
“While we typically have 150,000 people request mail-in ballots, we know that we historically don’t get that many returns,” Ms. Garofolo said. “So we want to look at the areas where we’re not getting a high percentage of returns back and start evaluating that to see if there’s trends over the last four years.”
First Published: May 13, 2024, 6:08 p.m.
Updated: May 14, 2024, 9:50 a.m.