Vote canvassing delayed in Washington, Greene due to last-minute ballots
Washington County’s canvassing board convened Friday morning to tabulate hundreds of overseas civilian and military ballots, while also starting to wade through nearly 2,000 provisional votes to see if they should count.
The six people split between Democrats and Republicans reviewed the 143 military ballots and 42 civilian overseas votes, along with roughly 100 “federal” ballots from people living in another country with dual citizenship in the United States.
Those overseas ballots are emailed to voters, who then print them off and mail them back to the elections office in Washington. Since that exact ballot can’t be scanned, the canvassing board – grouped into three bipartisan teams of two – replicated the voter’s choices on a ballot that can be scanned and stored.
As of Friday morning in the presidential race, Republican Donald Trump had won 71,072 votes in Washington County, with Democrat Joe Biden receiving 44,231 votes. Libertarian candidate Jo Jorgensen received 1,284, and there were 276 write-in votes.
However, Biden passed Trump in statewide votes Friday morning, thanks to the large number of mail-in ballots submitted overwhelmingly by Democrats. Elections officials in Washington County had already tallied all of the 36,795 vote-by-mail ballots on Election Day, and were able to release the unofficial results Tuesday night.
As of Thursday night, the office had received 95 additional ballots that were postmarked by Nov. 3, but had to arrive by 5 p.m. Friday, county elections Director Melanie Ostrander said. Another 17 were postmarked on Nov. 4, meaning they were automatically disqualified, Ostrander said.
But there are also 1,839 provisional ballots that could be added to the mix, depending on whether the voter was eligible. The vote can be disqualified if the person already submitted a mail-in ballot or isn’t registered, or counted in only some races if the person voted in the wrong precinct. Just like the tardy mail-in ballots, the provisionals will be segregated in the event there is a legal challenge.
The full canvassing of all votes won’t begin until Wednesday at the earliest to allow for military ballots to arrive by this Tuesday’s deadline, Ostrander said. She expects that work to take about a week.
“I’m shooting for that as long as nothing happens,” she said.
Once that is completed the final vote totals will be sent to the Washington County elections board – made up of the county’s three commissioners – to be certified and sent to Harrisburg no later than Nov. 23.
In Greene County, elections workers were continuing to count the remaining mail-in ballots out of its total of 4,385. Chief Clerk Jeff Marshall said by 2:30 p.m. Friday, workers had scanned and counted 4,036 of them.
He said its county’s vote canvassing, which was supposed to begin Friday morning, was pushed back until Monday so they could finish counting the mail votes.
“Until we have everything ready, it made no sense to start the process,” Marshall said. “Lets get everything done with one aspect before we start another aspect.”