The Lackawanna County Bureau of Elections referred a complaint about potential ballot tampering at a Scranton polling place to the county district attorney\u2019s office, officials said in a news release.<\/p>\n
It notes the bureau was \u201cmade aware of a situation \u2026 involving potential ballot tampering\u201d during Tuesday\u2019s municipal election and referred the matter to the DA\u2019s office for further investigation after conducting a preliminary review.<\/p>\n
\u201cBecause of the nature of the allegation and the ongoing investigation by the District Attorney, the Elections Bureau cannot make any further comment,\u201d the release says. \u201cAll further inquiries should be directed to the District Attorney\u2019s office.\u201d<\/p>\n
While the release doesn\u2019t provide details about the incident, a Facebook user claimed in a post Tuesday that they went to vote at the Jackson Heights polling place in West Scranton and were handed a ballot with a name already written in the write-in space for judge of election. The post included a photo of the ballot the Facebook user claimed they received.<\/p>\n
District Attorney Brian Gallagher confirmed in a text message that an investigation into that incident was referred to him by county elections Director Beth Hopkins.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy office has opened a criminal investigation,\u201d Gallagher wrote. \u201cI won\u2019t have further comment until the investigation concludes.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Lackawanna County Bureau of Elections referred a complaint about potential ballot tampering at a Scranton polling place…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":23407,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[836,201,182,139,28,50,178,180,179],"class_list":{"0":"post-26422","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-scranton","8":"tag-election","9":"tag-lackawanna-county","10":"tag-local-news","11":"tag-news","12":"tag-pennsylvania","13":"tag-politics","14":"tag-scranton","15":"tag-scranton-headlines","16":"tag-scranton-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26422","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=26422"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26422\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23407"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}