Oct 16, 2020 4 min read

Any Pennsylvanian planning to vote in the upcoming Nov. 3 presidential election must be registered or update residence information by no later than Monday.

The Commonwealth’s Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar said this week total voter registrations are approaching 9 million, a target that she hopes to see residents reach.

Statewide, according to figures released Wednesday during a Zoom press conference, Boockvar reported 4,192,729 Democrats; 3,484,819 Republicans; 886,613 voters with no affiliation; and 398,651 who identified themselves as members of other political parties.

For the first time in generations, Republican voter registration exceeded that of Democrats in Washington County, an area once dominated by Democratic labor union membership in the steel and coal industries.

As of 3 p.m. Thursday, there were 66,432 Republicans, 66,140 Democrats and 18,285 minor party members, independents and voters who identified themselves as unaffiliated, according to Washington County Election Director Melanie Ostrander.

Republican registrations had been inching up, and they overtook those of Democrats, who, barring any last-minute registration drives, are now in the minority in Washington County.

The www.votespa website emphasizes that people “must register to vote at the address where you actually live – your residence address. Owning property or a business in a county does not make you a resident of that county.”

The county on Thursday moved its ballot drop box from the second-floor hallway at Courthouse Square to inside the elections office.

“We had a complaint that someone witnessed somebody putting in more than one ballot,” Ostrander said.

Signage was posted above the box that voters were to return only their own ballot, although mail-in and absentee ballots have a place for a person with disabilities to sign that approves of someone else to drop off a ballot.

“The public may not have known that,” Ostrander said of the exception. “So we moved it inside to have complete control over it.”

The elections office is now stamping ballots with time and date dropped off as they arrive, a task they had been carrying out at the end of each business day.

In the Zoom news conference, Boockvar said she knew of no reason to challenge a ballot based on the voter’s handwritten date accompanying the signature on the outer envelope differing from the date the ballot was dropped off.

Ostrander likened it to a voter signing a mail-in ballot one day but having a later date on the postmark.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled last month that county elections offices must tabulate ballots postmarked by this year’s Nov. 3 Election Day as long as the counties receive them by Friday, Nov. 6.

A law has been in place for several years that allows military and overseas civilian ballots postmarked by Election Day to be counted if the elections office receives them one week after the election.

Fayette County has sent out about 13,000 mail-in and absentee, and received “several thousand” back, according to county Commissioner Vince Vicites, a majority of which he said were sent back through the mail rather than hand-delivered to the office. Fellow Commissioner Dave Lohr added that the elections office has been busy processing the requests and returned ballots.

“Everyone down (in the elections office), they’re flying like crazy,” Lohr said. “It’s all hands on deck. I believe it’s heading in the right direction.”

Greene County Commissioner Mike Belding said they have sent out about 4,600 mail-in and absentee ballots. Of that total, 1,461 have been returned through the mail and about 300 have been personally delivered to the elections office on the first floor of the county building in Waynesburg.

“You can imagine, we’re busy,” Belding said. “We’re keeping up.”

Staff writer Mike Jones contributed to this story.