EBENSBURG – Between blocks of computer “timing” code are seven small numbers in the left margin of the Election Day ballots that Cambria County finally began scanning on Nov. 5 to tally the results.
They were identical to the “test ballots” the county tested in early October, attorney Ron Repak Jr. said. of Cambria County.
Those who failed to scan the morning of Election Day missed those numbers, an examination of both types of blank ballots by The Tribune-Democrat found.
Cambria County officials acknowledged that their own safety procedure likely prevented the issue from being noticed earlier.
After running their test ballots through the scanning machines in early October, election officials sealed the electronic scanning equipment to prevent anyone from tampering with the machines. The official Election Day ballots that arrived afterward — believed to be identical — were not tested in the weeks leading up to Nov. 5, Repak and Cambria County Chief Executive Scott Hunt said.
“We followed the same process that the county had followed for years,” Hunt said during an interview Thursday. “The test ballots were tested and working properly before our printer cleared us to continue (making the ballots for Election Day).”
Those ballots were also double-checked for spelling and other errors during the “logging and accuracy” process, Hunt said.
Nearly identical “mail-in” ballots — which should reach Cambria County voters’ mailboxes well before Election Day — were also tested and approved as scannable by the county’s vote-counting machines when the testing took place, Hunt and Repak said.
Hunt, who has been in office for five election cycles, said the county had never had problems scanning ballots on Election Day before last week — which made diagnosing the problem so difficult, as reports of problems reached the courthouse starting at 125 votes . area the morning of November 5.
The issue made national headlines and drew criticism from some county residents.
Ultimately, the county used temporary lock boxes at each precinct to store voters’ completed ballots that morning. County deputies were dispatched to the Pittsburgh area to pick up several new batches of ballots from William Penn Printing, the county’s ballot vendor.
This time, officials made sure the roughly 18-inch-long ballots had the numbered code that was missing from the original, unscannable ballots on Election Day, Hunt said.
Cambria County Elections Director Maryann Dillon said the series of blocks and numbers are a series of “timing marks” embedded in ballots. According to the Washington, D.C.-based Brennan Center for Justice, these marks are a security measure that shows scanners exactly where to read votes on a ballot and makes it harder for people to reproduce counterfeits.
Costs for additional ballots uncertain
Hunt said the county’s relationship with William Penn Printing goes back decades.
Tribune-Democrat archives show the company has provided county ballots throughout the entire period it has used voter-verifiable paper ballots.
That switch to ballots and scanners from ES&S voting machines was approved in May 2019.
Hunt said he was not aware of any previous issues and that the company acted quickly to print usable ballots as soon as notified on Nov. 5.
The initial voting orders and election materials were paid for through a state election integrity grant, he said.
It’s too early to speculate whether the county will have to pay additional costs for ordering about 40,000 additional ballots on Election Day to fix the problem, Hunt said.
But he and Repak said it’s clear the province will look for ways — and procedural changes that can be made — to ensure the issue never happens again.
Repak described the case as a “systemic error” that the province can try to prevent recurrence with appropriate testing safeguards.
But he said the province already recognizes there are ways they can learn from last week’s “chaos.”
Repak said a notification alert system will be implemented that will allow poll workers in all 125 precincts to be alerted — en masse and at once — to quickly inform workers when changes are needed on Election Day.
“That’s priority number one,” he said.
