Three allegations of potential election code violations in Berks County have been turned over to local authorities for investigation.<\/p>\n
At a meeting of the board of elections Thursday, First Assistant County Solicitor Cody Kauffman presented three complaints stemming from the May 19 primary election.<\/p>\n
The first incident involved text messages being sent to a voter that failed to indicate who paid for them. Kauffman said the person who filed the complaint was mentioned in the text messages without their consent.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople need to take this stuff seriously and understand that there are consequences if they don\u2019t follow the rules,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The two other incidents involve two county employees who were taking calls from voters on Election Day. Kauffman said there is evidence the employees made unauthorized changes to the Statewide Uniform Registry of Electors system.<\/p>\n
The SURE system is a statewide database used by counties to register voters, maintain their records and carry out many of the functions necessary to run elections. Kauffman said employees taking calls are given access to the system so they can assist voters who may have questions about their registration status or polling location.<\/p>\n
One of the employees updated their own information while the other made changes to the registration of someone else.<\/p>\n
Kauffman said the concern is that the voter registration deadline had passed for the May primary when these changes were made and, more importantly, voters wanting to update registration information must submit a form to election services in order for those changes to be made.<\/p>\n
\u201cGiven the sensitive nature of voter registration information and the safeguards in place to ensure its integrity \u2014 while these changes seem minimal, it is nonetheless concerning when this information is altered without authorization,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Kauffman recommended these incidents be turned over to the district attorney\u2019s office for further investigation.<\/p>\n
The board voted unanimously to forward the issue to law enforcement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Three allegations of potential election code violations in Berks County have been turned over to local authorities for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":12644,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[349,182,139,28,128,130,129],"class_list":["post-204693","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-reading","tag-berks-county","tag-local-news","tag-news","tag-pennsylvania","tag-reading-city","tag-reading-city-headlines","tag-reading-city-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204693","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=204693"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204693\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12644"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=204693"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=204693"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=204693"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}