The Erie County Courthouse (Capital-Star photo by Hannah McDonald)
A judge has ordered the Erie County Board of Elections to extend its operating hours and take other steps to ensure that thousands of voters who requested mail ballots but did not receive them can still get mail ballots and return them by the Election Day deadline.
The judge’s order comes after the Democratic Party of Pennsylvania sued the county in an attempt to get officials to remedy the problems.
“So this week, we headed to court to make sure that those voters have a chance to vote; and we won,” a senior Harris campaign official said on a call with reporters Friday. “Erie is now extending hours through the weekend for local voters, and they are overnighting ballots to voters who may be out of state. We certainly wish that these errors didn’t happen, but in a country with elections administered at the local level, with almost 200,000 precincts, isolated incidents are inevitable.”
The Democratic Party filed the suit on Wednesday, with the support of Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign, and the Republican Party of Pennsylvania was added as an intervenor on Thursday.
Erie Court of Common Pleas Judge David Ridge ordered the elections board to remain open over the weekend Saturday and Sunday from 8 a.m. until 4 p.m. and Monday from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.
The issues in Erie began with an Ohio-based third-party vendor, ElectionIQ, a contractor that prints and mails the county’s mail ballots.
A software failure caused ElectionIQ to send duplicate ballots that went into incorrect envelopes, with some voters receiving other voters’ envelopes. The U.S. Postal Service said it had been “unable to account for,” another 1,800 mail ballots, according to the lawsuit, which the county says were never mailed by ElectionIQ.
The lawsuit claimed that mail ballot return rates in Erie were below the statewide average, with only about 52% of voters who requested mail ballots receiving them by Oct. 28. Statewide, the return number is at 67%.
In a hearing in Erie on Friday, it was determined that “at minimum,” 365 duplicate ballots were sent to voters which contained a mail-in ballot that had a barcode corresponding to a different voter. Between 13,000 and 17,000 Erie County voters who had requested a mail ballot have still not received one, and some 1,200 voters who temporarily live out of state, such as college students, had not received their ballots, either.
In addition to the extended hours, the judge ordered the elections board to add another printer at its office, and allow voters who had applied for a mail ballot to cancel their request, be issued a new mail-in ballot immediately, and cast that mail-in ballot at one of two drop boxes at the Erie County Courthouse.
The elections board has to ensure that enough ballots and provisional ballots are available at all Erie County polling locations, and must release the names and email addresses of the out-of-state voters still waiting on mail ballots to the parties, and, in some cases, use overnight delivery services to send replacement ballots to the out-of-state voters.
The board of elections also was ordered to contact all voters who received a duplicate ballot and all voters whose name appeared on a duplicate ballot intended for another voter, so they might cancel their previous ballot, and submit a new ballot. All of those votes are to be segregated so that officials have time to ensure that the ballots are accurate.
Erie is considered a key bellwether county in battleground Pennsylvania, which has 19 electoral votes that either party needs to clinch the presidency. Former President Donald Trump, the GOP nominee for president, beat Hillary Clinton in Erie County in 2016 by just over 1,900 votes. But Democrats appeared to learn from their 2016 defeat; Joe Biden beat Trump in Erie in the 2020 election by a margin of just over 1,400 votes, or 1.03%, as Pennsylvania flipped blue again.
The candidates at the top of both parties tickets — Vice President Kamala Harris, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) and Trump have all campaigned in Erie during the current election cycle.