On Wednesday, Lehigh County Executive Josh Siegel held a news conference to provide more information, including some new numbers, on the ballot bungle.<\/p>\n
Siegel says they caught the issue this week when dozens of mail in ballots were returned to the election office with incorrect addresses.<\/p>\n
This prompted officials to reach out to the Department of State.<\/p>\n
Now, the county is working to fix the issue and make sure everyone is able to cast their ballots.<\/p>\n
Hundreds of people in Lehigh County are being mailed new ballots.<\/p>\n
County Executive Josh Siegel says when the election office was preparing the initial batch of mail in ballots for the upcoming primary, they accidentally selected the voter file from the may 2025 primary, instead of the may 2026 primary.<\/p>\n
“Those are the individuals who changed their registration between 2025 and 2026 and those who changed their address,” said Lehigh County Executive Josh Siegel.<\/p>\n
This led to nearly 100 people receiving a ballot from the wrong party, and around 124 people whose ballots came back as undeliverable because of changed addresses.\u2002\u2002\u2002\u2002<\/p>\n
Those who received ballots from the wrong party are being mailed correct ones.<\/p>\n
The ballots that came back to the election office have been repacked and sent to the correct addresses.<\/p>\n
In addition to new ballots, voters will also be hearing directly from county leadership about what went wrong.<\/p>\n
“We will be sending them a letter through our printer who also sends our mail in ballots out indicating why it happened explaining the circumstances in full transparency owning the issue and owning the clerical problem and explaining how they can make sure their ballot will still be counted in a timely fashion,” says Siegel.<\/p>\n
Siegel says the error was caught quickly and that officials are working to make sure people can successfully vote in the upcoming primary.<\/p>\n
“We will make sure that everyone who wants to cast a lawful and legal ballot in this election has the ability to do so,” he adds.<\/p>\n
There’s also a large number of people who requested mail in ballots for 2026 and not 2025- and vice versa.<\/p>\n
Those are also being fixed.<\/p>\n
Anyone who is on that list is strongly encouraged to use drop boxes or vote in person on Election Day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On Wednesday, Lehigh County Executive Josh Siegel held a news conference to provide more information, including some new…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":186269,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[214,119,121,120,433],"class_list":["post-186268","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-allentown","tag-_homepage_top_stories","tag-allentown","tag-allentown-headlines","tag-allentown-news","tag-lehigh-county"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186268","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186268"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186268\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/186269"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186268"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186268"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186268"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}