Fayette County commissioners sign and submit primary election results to the state
The results of the Fayette County primary election have been signed by the county commissioners and submitted to the state.
“Everything is done,” said Commissioner Dave Lohr on Tuesday.
On Monday night, Lohr and Commissioners Vincent Vicites and Scott Dunn, who comprise the county election board, were able to have a partial signing with one precinct still in the adjudication process. That partial signing was sent to the state to meet Pennsylvania’s deadline for election certification for the counties.
“Any additional adjudication of write-in votes they are doing is related to local offices,” said Ellen Lyon, the deputy director of the Office of Communications and Press for the Pennsylvania Department of State.
For Fayette County, the process to meet that deadline was a hectic one.
More than 6,000 ballots for the May 18 primary were not scanned because some Republican ballots did not have bar codes printed on them. That meant the votes couldn’t be scanned and counted by voting machines.
Votes from those unscanned ballots were manually entered into an ADA voting machine, printed out and then scanned and counted, a lengthy process that started the day after the election and was completed last week.
Following that, the adjudication process started, with ballots being examined for to check for problems like over voting and other mistakes like different spellings of names on write-in votes.
“The volume of the write-in votes is what made that process long,” said Larry Blosser, the director of the Fayette County Election Bureau.
As of 11:40 a.m. on Tuesday, the adjudication process was complete, and the county commissioners signed and sent the full certification of election results to the state.
After the first signed election results are sent out, there are five business days to file any challenges of the results. The challenge period closes at 4:30 p.m. on Tuesday, June 15.
“At this point, I don’t know what’s going to transpire with that,” Blosser said.
After that five-day period, the county commissioners will sign a second certification of the results for the state.
“Provided there are no requests for recounts, the returns they transmitted to us last evening will become official after five days,” Lyon said. “If a recount is requested for a particular contest, that recount will not necessarily impact the other contests on the ballot.”
Lohr said the election process has been made more complex, and the commissioners will continue to try and tweak it to make it work better for all involved.
Blosser thanked the constituents for giving the election bureau time to make sure they did what they had to do to accurately count and record the results.
“This process has been daunting at times with everything that occurred. The staff has really stepped up to the plate, and we delivered an accurate count of our election,” Blosser said. “I’m exhilarated now that this is almost over.”
The unofficial results with complete vote tallies have been updated on the Fayette County Election Bureau page of the county website, www.FayetteCountyPA.org.