EASTON, Pa. – Northampton County Elections Registrar Chris Commini says the county successfully conducted last month’s primary election on Tuesday, May 19.<\/p>\n
But several residents who spoke before the county’s election commission this week, as well as some members of the commission itself, might disagree with that assessment.<\/p>\n
Eight residents \u2014 many of whom participated in the election not just as voters but also as poll watchers or precinct supervisors and volunteers \u2014 delivered a blistering review of how the county executed its Election Day game plan, taking issue with everything from internal communication to machine performance to signage posted for new polling places.<\/p>\n
‘Barbarically stupid’ rollout\u00a0<\/p>\n
The May primary brought the implementation of the county’s redistricting plan, launched as a response to population growth in communities such as Forks, Palmer, Upper Nazareth and Lower Nazareth townships. Some districts were divided to better distribute voters, while others were consolidated.<\/p>\n
The redistricting had been in the works since 2023, according to solicitor Michael Vargo. It was decided to implement the changes for the most recent election cycle due to the low number of contested races on the ballots.<\/p>\n
But delays in getting the Pennsylvania Department of State to sign off on the changes led to some “downstream impacts,” Vargo said, including some candidates for political party positions unknowingly filing petitions in the wrong district.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow this thing was rolled out was just barbarically stupid, actually, and we\u2019re seeing the results of this now,\u201d said Al Smith of Nazareth, one of the residents who spoke during the public comment portion of Tuesday’s meeting at the county government center in Easton.<\/p>\n
Smith said he worked at several polling places on Election Day and witnessed a number of issues. In one instance, a candidate’s name was left off the ballot, Smith said. He also said some voters were having a hard time finding their new polling place in Upper and Lower Nazareth townships, due to a lack of adequate signage.<\/p>\n
Pollbooks problems\u00a0<\/p>\n
Bob Jellison of Bath, who served as majority inspector for a polling place in Moore Township, was one of the commentors who raised concerns about initial pollbook discrepancies between the county-supplied list of those voting with a mail-in ballot and those eligible to vote in-person.<\/p>\n
According to Jellison, at the start of Election Day, of the 407 names listed on the mail-in ballot tally, 192 were also shown as eligible to vote at the polling place. Later, the county supplied new lists and asked the judge of election to update the pollbooks, mid-election.\u00a0\u201cThis needs to be understood as to how this big of an error could happen,\u201d Jellison said.<\/p>\n
Commini acknowledged the wrong file had been uploaded to the electronic pollbooks. “Every file that we can download has the same information, but it’s parsed in a specific manner. We pulled the wrong file.”<\/p>\n
Once the error was identified, all judges of election were contacted via their county-issued cell phone and given instructions on how to update their pollbooks, Commini said. The pollbooks are not connected to the internet, so it’s not possible for the county to send out a quick, automatic fix.\u00a0<\/p>\n
And not everyone got the message at first. Joan Skutches, the judge of election for Bushkill Township’s Cherry Hill precinct, said, unbeknownst to her, on Election Day the county tried to contact her on her personal cell phone, and not the county-issued phone. She said it was close to 8 p.m. before she found out about the error. \u201cI\u2019m freaking out, because I did not know I was supposed to update the e-book,\u201d Skutches said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Commini said, despite the widespread confusion about the conflicting lists, a post-election review showed no voter cast more than one ballot for the May primary.<\/p>\n
The county’s elections division has purchased new electronic pollbooks with enhanced security to be used starting in November.\u00a0It’s also seeking administration approval to buy a new mail-in ballot sorter, Commini reported.\u00a0<\/p>\n
‘Mistakes are made’<\/p>\n
During his report to the commission, Commini touched on other problems as well. Without naming specific locations, he said both voting machines at one polling place went down at the same time; one was fixable, one was not. A replacement machine was deployed.<\/p>\n
A few locations had machines with card issues that required a reset. Also, the extreme heat and humidity caused paper jams in some machines.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Overall, Commini summed up May 19 this way:<\/p>\n
“There were isolated operational issues that were reported within the county on Election Day. In each instance election staff responded promptly, voting continued uninterrupted or with minimal delay, and all ballots were properly cast and counted.\u201d<\/p>\n
In reality, problems popped up before any ballots were cast for the May primary. Some voters received duplicate mail-in ballots, or a ballot for the incorrect political party. One entire precinct received incorrect ballots. Northampton County declined to provide specifics on the number of impacted voters and said all problems had been corrected before election day.<\/p>\n
On Tuesday, Election Commission Vice Chair Scott Hough asked whether the same person or people were responsible for the latest mistakes. Commini said no.<\/p>\n
“So we have multiple people in the office who are making mistakes?” Hough pressed.<\/p>\n
“Mistakes are made,” Commini said. “It’s a human endeavor.”<\/p>\n
Later in the meeting, Commini was asked whether his office was being stretched too thin to accommodate efforts launched to make it easier for voters to register and cast a ballot, such as pop-up events and ballot-on-demand voting.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“This to me is about bandwidth and workload,” said commission member Shawn Welch.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Northampton County introduced the voter pop-ups in April. Four different events were held, in which residents could register to vote, apply for a mail-in or absentee ballot, receive and complete a ballot on demand, and \/ or return their ballot on site or via drop box.<\/p>\n
During the meeting, Hough introduced a motion to do away with future pop-up events, then amended it to just suspend the events until next year, which ultimately failed to pass.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Welch and Hough voted yes on the amendment. Election Commission Chair Sharon Gavin-Levy voted no, as did members Richard Groff and Becky Bartlett. “I think the role of this commission is to help people to vote,” said Groff. “It’s not to send walls out here to keep people away from the voting booth.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"EASTON, Pa. – Northampton County Elections Registrar Chris Commini says the county successfully conducted last month’s primary election…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":195661,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[214,153,155,154,6290,836],"class_list":["post-210301","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-bethlehem","tag-_homepage_top_stories","tag-bethlehem","tag-bethlehem-headlines","tag-bethlehem-news","tag-easton-area","tag-election"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210301","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=210301"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210301\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/195661"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=210301"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=210301"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=210301"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}