Allegheny County says voting process is secure

What happens to your ballot once you turn it in?

With the presidential election just days away, Allegheny County has been prepping and distributing voting machines to precincts across the county.

Elections Division Manager Dave Voye, who explained the step-by-step tabulation process Wednesday in the county’s election warehouse on Pittsburgh’s North Side, said he’s confident the voting process is safe and secure.

“Your ballot is tabulated correctly in this county — there’s no two ways about it,” Voye said.

He said he believes transparency in the tabulation process is important, which is why members of the media were invited to document the details ahead of Election Day on Tuesday.

“We want this process to be open and let people know what we’re doing,” Voye said.

On Nov. 5, the goal is to have all votes counted on time and correctly, he said.

Elections Assistant Division Manager Chet Harhut said he hopes to finish counting all of the ballots that are in the elections warehouse by 8 p.m. Election Day.

The count won’t include all of the military ballots, which can be turned in up to a week after Election day, and the last mail drop from the post office that will arrive at 7:30 p.m. that day, he said.

Mail-in and absentee ballots are being collected at the election warehouse and locked in cages, which won’t be able to be opened until 7 a.m. Tuesday, according to election officials.

As of Wednesday morning, 186,760 ballots were returned from voters — 1,190 of which had errors and were sent back to voters. Of those, 738, or 62%, were corrected and returned once again, which officials said is a high number.

Election officials said 254,434 total mail-in ballots applications were approved for this election, so they’re expecting to count around 200,000 on Election Day.

Setting up precincts

Since Monday, voting machines have been delivered to the 1,327 precincts at 766 polling places around Allegheny County, Harhut said. Some polling places have more than one precinct in the building, and 88 precincts will receive a second machine due to the amount of people registered to vote there.

The package that each precinct receives, which is sealed and locked, includes a voting machine, privacy booth, a voting machine that complies with the Americans with Disabilities Act, empty ballots and other supplies, he said. The keys to each machine are given to a judge of elections at each location.

“A trucking company comes and delivers them all,” Harhut said. “It takes six working days to deliver all of the machines.”

He said there have been no issues in the past with machines being tampered with before poll workers open them Election Day morning.

“A lot of times, they’re government buildings and schools and things like that, so they are secure buildings,” Harhut said. “But if it’s a private (building) … we work with them to make sure they’re locked up and secure throughout the week,” Harhut said.

Election Day procedures

Once the cages containing the mail-in and absentee ballots are opened, they’re checked again to make sure everything’s accurate on Election Day morning, such as the signature and date, Harhut said.

These ballots were all previously checked once for accuracy before being placed into the cages as well, he said, which is when voters will notice the status of their ballot change to “received” online.

On Election Day, 237 county workers will work with the envelopes once they’re opened and unfold the ballots to be scanned, Administrative Services Director Jessica Garofolo said.

Harhut said the BlueCrest Machine that opens the envelopes can open 50,000 per hour.

“Staff will take out yellow secrecy envelopes from those declaration envelopes, go back through the BlueCrest machine one more time where the secrecy envelope is opened.

“Then they come back to this room, and staff will actually start to take the ballots out, unfold the ballots out and smooth them out as best they can to run through the scanners for tabulation,” Garofolo said. She said the machine is used multiple times throughout the process.

She said once the ballots are taken to the scanner, 280 can be processed per minute.

This machine is used for opening and sorting ballot envelopes. It can open 50,000 envelopes every hour @TribLIVE ✉️ pic.twitter.com/alp0rcMKYC

— Megan Swift (@mgswift7) October 30, 2024

“We have protocols in space to ensure staff aren’t double counting,” Garofolo said. “Everything is monitored.”

The mail-in and absentee votes that are counted at the election warehouse will be combined with each precinct’s vote totals, which are collected through two flash drives, an official and unofficial flash drive, Voye said. They will be combined in the tabulation room.

“The unofficial (flash drive) is read in over the internet through the county’s network. These results are only used for election night reporting,” he said. “We read the official stick into a closed network, (and) we match those results and make sure everything’s correct.”

The flash drives, which are encrypted, are delivered by poll workers to one of eight regional reporting centers in the county — with a police escort.

Voye said the county has essentially 15 days to finish the process before posting the preliminary election results, after which people have five days to file election challenges in court.

He said those results will then become certified 20 business days after the election. Tentatively, the board of elections meeting is scheduled for Nov. 25.

Pennsylvania’s heightened scrutiny as a battleground state has brought extra pressure to the election, Voye said, as well as a lot of sleepless nights.

“It’s even frustrating going home to watch the news when you’re trying to have dinner, endless commercials,” he said. “Plus-minus ratio of these polls puts it as a dead heat; it’s going to make it very close here.”