A Republican Scranton voter and Lackawanna County have settled a federal lawsuit the voter filed because he never received a mail-in ballot in an election last year.<\/p>\n
The county Bureau of Elections sent corrected mail-in ballots to 545 Republican voters for the May 20, 2025, primary election because the first batch listed candidates for the May 2024 primary election.<\/p>\n
His lawsuit, filed Dec. 29, said Eugene Kopecki, 83, called the county Bureau of Elections to report the mistake. An official told him he would get a corrected ballot in the mail.<\/p>\n
He never did, \u201cleaving him unable to vote in the 2025 primary election,\u201d according to the suit.<\/p>\n
In all, 395 Scranton Republicans who received corrected mail-in ballots cast them in a primary election that included choices for the party nominee for Scranton mayor, the suit says.<\/p>\n
The inadequacy of the county\u2019s quality control policies and procedures and its failure to properly train staff to review mail-in ballots led to a violation of Kopecki\u2019s right to vote under the U.S. Constitution, the suit said.<\/p>\n
The settlement<\/p>\n
There was no mention in the settlement of monetary compensation. Under the consent decree and order settling Kopecki\u2019s suit, filed Monday, the county agreed to, within six months:<\/p>\n
Adopt a written manual establishing \u201ca comprehensive set of election-related policies and procedures to guide all aspects of (the county\u2019s) administration of elections.\u201d The manual must include \u201cinstructions for drafting, designing, proofreading, printing and quality control of mail-in and absentee ballots.\u201dDevelop a comprehensive training program for all election workers on how to handle mail-in ballots.Require all newly hired election employees to attend specialized training on election laws, policies and proceduresThe mistake<\/p>\n
After discovering the mistake, county elections director Beth Hopkins blamed it on the printing company but was unsure why the error occurred.<\/p>\n
Countywide, more than 12,000 voters of both parties were mailed ballots for the primary. Only the 545 Republican Scranton ballots were incorrect, and they were the only Scranton Republican mail-in ballots, she said. The printing of the Scranton ballots was held up by a challenge to one mayoral candidate\u2019s ballot status. No other municipalities had a similar mistake.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, they were printed in a separate printing batch. So, I’m just not quite sure why the printer selected an old file instead of the current file,\u201d she said then.<\/p>\n
Policy manual in the works<\/p>\n
Hopkins said Tuesday the county has begun working on the policy manual and plans to have it ready soon.<\/p>\n
The county\u2019s ballot printer, Election Systems & Software, acknowledged its error and apologized. Hopkins said she still can\u2019t understand why the 2024 ballots still existed in ES&S’ system but acknowledged the bureau should have checked the incorrect ballots before mailing them.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe weren\u2019t denying the fact that when the ballots came back, the person didn\u2019t review the top of the ballot (where the date is),\u201d she said. \u201cNow, there\u2019s a checklist in place.<\/p>\n
\u201cEverybody is working hard on rectifying it and we\u2019re working hard on our manual and it will be a good thing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Where’s the ballot?<\/p>\n
Hopkins said she was unable to determine what happened to the corrected ballot mailed to Kopecki.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was not returned as undeliverable,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Caleb Hays, chief policy counsel for the Center for Election Confidence, which represented Kopecki, said he \u201ccouldn\u2019t venture to guess\u201d what happened to the ballot.<\/p>\n
\u201cI know certainly that the county intended for it to make it there, and that Mr. Kopecki was very earnest about it arriving, and for whatever reason it didn’t end up there,\u201d he said. \u201cOutside of this particular situation, I think we’re seeing, unfortunately, some bad developments at the postal service, the change in postmarking and delivery promise times, which has affected you know a lot of people.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hays said other Scranton Republicans did not receive corrected ballots \u2014 he could not immediately provide a number \u2014 but said it was a \u201cdecent\u201d number.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt wasn’t just Mr. Kopecki,\u201d he said. \u201cI don’t think this was done on purpose. I think that across the country, whenever we see issues happen with elections, by and large, an overwhelming amount of times, it’s not intentional. Any system with humans involved is going to have some amount of human error, and I think that’s what we saw here too.\u201d<\/p>\n
The lawsuit\u2019s goal was \u201cto help the county improve their processes,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere’s been a really collaborative process between Mr. Kopecki and the county in putting together a plan for some better procedures training and I think most importantly an election procedures manual to make sure that you know they don’t end up in this situation again, Hays said.<\/p>\n
Efforts to reach Kopecki were unsuccessful.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Republican Scranton voter and Lackawanna County have settled a federal lawsuit the voter filed because he never…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":30597,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[178,180,179],"class_list":["post-259222","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-scranton","tag-scranton","tag-scranton-headlines","tag-scranton-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259222","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=259222"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259222\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30597"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=259222"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=259222"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=259222"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}