The general election Tuesday came with an early disclaimer: Don’t expect anything fast.
Amid tight races and more than 1 million mail-in and absentee ballots, Pennsylvania elections officials warned decisive counts may materialize after election night. In November 2020, mail-in ballot results in Allegheny County appeared more than a day after the polls closed.
But Pennsylvanians didn’t have much of a wait this week. Clear outcomes in contests from the governorship to the U.S. House and Senate emerged around midnight on Election Day or just afterward. The commonwealth’s second-most-populated county wrapped up mail-in counts before 11 p.m.
County Council members attributed the performance to adept work by the county Elections Division and to fewer mail-in and absentee ballots, which can take a while to open, review and tabulate. Mail-in and absentee voters numbered about 162,300 countywide in this cycle — down from more than 310,000 in November 2020, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.
State law prevents workers from opening those ballots before Election Day.
“Allegheny County has learned a lot since 2020,” said Sam DeMarco, an at-large member of the County Council and chairman of the county Republican committee.
The elections operation has become more efficient and better equipped as the staff learns from each cycle, Mr. DeMarco said. The division now has 10 high-speed scanners to process mail ballots, up from eight in 2020, he said.
County elections officials were not immediately available Wednesday. Mr. DeMarco called their work a standard for Pennsylvania. Earlier this month, deputy elections manager Chet Harhut projected most mail-in ballot results would be complete soon after the polls close — absent any catastrophes.
“Usually, for midterm elections, turnout isn’t as heavy as it was for this year,” said Pat Catena, the County Council president. He praised workers for “an efficient operation.”
They hope to have an estimate of provisional ballots by late Thursday, according to county spokeswoman Amie Downs. The Republican National Committee has indicated plans to challenge provisional ballots from voters who also cast an absentee or mail-in ballot, even if the latter was found uncountable under law, Ms. Downs said in a statement.
Total voter participation countywide registered at roughly 60%, or about 562,000, according to unofficial data. That’s up from about 58% during the midterm cycle in 2018.
Beaver County saw nearly 65% turnout in the latest cycle, according to its unofficial results. Voters sent some 15,000 mail ballots to the county Election Bureau, where the night shift lasted until about 3 a.m. Wednesday. Scanning wrapped up later in the morning, said elections director Colin Sisk.
“We were maybe more hopeful on the timeline and how quickly we would get it done,” Mr. Sisk said. Processing mail ballots can take “time you don’t expect,” he said, since they may need to be flattened different ways before a scanner will read them.
Overall, vote-counting across the commonwealth proved smoother than expected, said Jonathan Marks, deputy secretary for elections and commissions at the Pennsylvania Department of State. He credited county officials for building on past election cycles; poll workers for adapting to rule changes; and bipartisan state legislation for granting $45 million to improve election administration.
“Now you have medium-size and smaller counties that can make that kind of investment” in high-speed counting equipment, Mr. Marks said. Automated devices ease the burden of opening, unfolding and reading mail ballots, he said.
Pennsylvania voters submitted just over 1.2 million ballots by mail for the November election, down from around 2.6 million in November 2020, Mr. Marks noted. Nearly all had been tallied by Wednesday afternoon, although workers in Philadelphia and perhaps Luzerne counties were continuing to tally some, he said.
More robust staffing in elections offices also speeds the counting process, said Richard Hasen, a law professor who directs the Safeguard Democracy Project at the University of California, Los Angeles. COVID-19-related labor shortages contributed to slower results early in the pandemic, he said.
Another factor: Compared with the 2020 presidential race in Pennsylvania, Democrats appear to have bigger margins of victory in this cycle’s gubernatorial and U.S. Senate races, which made their outcomes evident faster, Mr. Hasen said.
Quicker results leave “less time for conspiracy theories to spread,” he said. “But in my view, accurate is much more important than quick. We can skimp on quick. We can’t skimp on accurate.”
Adam Smeltz: asmeltz@post-gazette.com, @asmeltz
First Published: November 9, 2022, 11:03 p.m.
Updated: November 10, 2022, 11:09 a.m.
