'I'm not working all night': Some counties will not count mail ballots until after Nov. 3

At least five counties in Pennsylvania will not be counting absentee and mail-in ballots on election night and will wait until the next day to do so.

Cumberland County in central Pennsylvania issued a news release saying it plans to start counting the mail-in and absentee ballots at 9 a.m. Wednesday. On Election Day, the county will focus on the smooth operation of its polling places.

"Due to available resources and the COVID-19 pandemic, this will allow the county to give equal weight to in-person and mail-in and absentee ballots," the release states.

Monroe County in the Pocono region plans to open the outer envelopes on the more than 38,800 mail-in and absentee ballots on Election Day. The following day, employees will pull out the secrecy envelopes with the ballots and then tabulate those, elections director Sara May-Silfee said.

Election Day is busy for the office as the polls are open from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m., and it can take until midnight for poll workers to turn in the results, May-Silfee said.

"I'm not working all night," she said. "I can't do it."

Greene, Beaver and Franklin counties also said they do not plan to tally mail-in and absentee ballots until the day after the election.

Officials from Montgomery and Bucks counties have said they expect to start the pre-canvassing and counting on the morning of Election Day.

Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar said Wednesday that she was aware of two counties that are waiting to tabulate the mail ballots, and her department was gathering more information about any others.

Boockvar said she is going to strongly urge counties to start pre-canvassing the ballots on Election Day.

"It's going to take a while, and the sooner they start, the sooner they'll finish," she said.

Boockvar said on Thursday afternoon that she is going to have a conversation with counties that are planning to wait on the absentee and mail-in ballots.  

State officials and counties wanted to start pre-canvassing the mail-in and absentee ballots at least a few days before the Nov. 3 election, but the General Assembly did not pass legislation that would have allowed that.

As a result, counties cannot start to process the ballots until 7 a.m. on Election Day.

"If state law had been changed to allow us the ability to pre-canvas (open and stage the mail-in ballots for scanning prior to election day) we would likely stay up all night processing and counting the mail-in votes," Beaver County Commissioner Jack Manning said in an email.

"We do not have the capacity to securely oversee 129 polling venues, secure those election day votes while simultaneously opening up ~ 35,000 mail-in votes, and then start manually scanning them after the polls close 8pm Tuesday," he wrote. 

Manning said the county will handle the in-person voting on Tuesday and then start fresh on Wednesday with the mail-in and absentee ballots.

Commissioner Daniel C. Camp III, president of the board, said its decision is not going to change. The county feels it is most safe and secure to use in-house staff to count the ballots, rather than bringing in volunteers to help.

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Franklin County, which has received more than 24,000 requests for mail ballots, plans to start at 8:30 a.m. Wednesday to count those ballots, said Jean Byers, deputy chief clerk. The county made the decision months ago to wait until the following day.

Results from the in-person voting come in through late Tuesday night. 

"Technically, how many thousands of votes can you count at that late time?" she said of the mail ballots. 

The County Commissioners Association of Pennsylvania says counties are prepared to run a successful election on Tuesday, but with the level of turnout expected for the presidential race and the volume of mail to process, it is going to take time to complete the count.

"We ask for patience from voters, the media and the candidates as results continue to come in once the polls close and perhaps for several days after, as counties will not sacrifice the integrity of the election in favor of speed," executive director Lisa Schaefer said in an email.

In Erie County, which was one of 206 counties nationwide that flipped for Trump in 2016 after twice backing President Barack Obama, the local elections board will not stray from its usual procedures. It will count all votes cast on Election Day first and tally mail-in and absentee ballots afterward.  

Erie County Board of Elections chairman Carl Anderson, who is also a member of Erie County Council, said that the board hopes to count about 10,000 mail-in ballots on election night. They’ll stop counting around 2 a.m. and resume later that morning. 

“There’s been a lot of pressure put on people to report the mail-in ballots because it is perceived that there may be a greater number of Democrats who are voting, which could then potentially increase those numbers across the state early on,” said Anderson, a Democrat. “We reject that, to use our system in a way that would skew it one way or another. We have a process that we use and we’re going to stick to that process.” 

The county tripled its election staff for the tally from the June 2 primary, bought two high-speed envelope openers and invested in a large rack with bins to help sort mail-in ballots by voting district. 

As of Friday morning, more than 37,000 mail-in and absentee ballots had been returned of the 57,000 that were requested. 

Erie reporter Matthew Rink contributed to this report.