‘Good number’ of voters who didn’t receive mailed ballots were able to vote
A “good number” of Fayette County mail-in voters who had not received a ballot are believed to have cast votes in person, though the exact numbers aren’t yet known, Fayette County’s elections director said Wednesday.
“Anecdotally, I believe a good number went to the polls,” said Marybeth Kusnik, director of the county’s election bureau. “From what I was told, people said, ‘Oh, yeah, I was one of those people,’ and then the judge told us.”
Kusnik said 308 voters had not received their mail-in ballots by Tuesday. The county and Pennsylvania Department of State are still reviewing the cause of the mailing issue, which led to problems with automatically generated ballot label files.
Fayette County provided the intelligent barcode IDs on the envelopes to the Department of State, which cross-checked them against their records to determine who hadn’t received their ballots, Kusnik said.
The county sent two automated calls to the voters in the week before the election with information about their options, Kuznik said. It had already received publicity through local and regional media, she said.
Kuznik also gave the list of voters to the Democratic and Republican party chairs in Fayette County, who brought it to their state party chairs to cross-check the names with state party records.
On Wednesday, election officials were looking at poll pads to make sure everyone who cast votes Tuesday got credit for voting in the state system. They are also researching the approximately 260 provisional ballots to see how many of those will count, Kuznik said.
Counties have until Nov. 23 to certify the final results.
Fayette County’s turnout for the midterm election was 48.7%, Kuznik said.
“That’s actually pretty amazing for a midterm,” she said. “The presidential will go bigger, but this one’s pretty big.”