Centre County’s ballot-counting decisions were misrepresented in national reporting surrounding a state Supreme Court ruling this week, county officials said on Tuesday.
The court ruled on Monday that Bucks, Montgomery and Philadelphia counties could not count misdated and undated mail ballots in their results from the Nov. 5 election. Centre County was not part of the case and had only three ballots with date issues in question, but multiple national media outlets inaccurately grouped it with the three counties that had sought to include hundreds of contested ballots.
The reporting prompted the Centre County commissioners — who are also the Board of Elections — to “set the record straight,” at Tuesday’s meeting, elections chair Amber Concepcion said.
Misreported information may have been taken from court filings or from political press releases that “do not correctly state the facts related to Centre County and undated mail-in or absentee ballots,” she added.
Commissioner Steve Dershem, a Republican who has been involved in election oversight for 21 years, bristled at the misreporting, saying he and Democrats Concepcion and Commissioner Mark Higgins all take the job of counting ballots “incredibly serious.”
“This particular situation to me is very disturbing,” Dershem said. “We were thrown into a bucket of soup with counties that obviously thumbed their nose at what would be considered reasonable decisions from our state Supreme Court. That was not us. Somehow we got put into that situation. We were called lawless. I would tell you that of this group, there was never, ever, and has never been any indication that what we’ve tried to do was nothing more than make sure the citizens of Centre County’s votes were counted. We are committed to that, and we will continue to be committed to that.”
No undated mail ballots were brought to Centre County’s Board of Elections. At its Nov. 7 meeting, the board reviewed numerous ballots with date irregularities and only approved three to be counted — each of which were then challenged.
“We were following guidance from the Pennsylvania Department of State and courts in how we made those decisions,” Concepcion said.
One of those ballots had too many characters in the date box and on another the voter had changed a 1 to a 0 in a date. Challenges to those ballots were withdrawn.
On the third ballot, the voter wrote the date using the military/European style of day-month-year instead of month-day-year. Centre County President Judge Jonathan Grine dismissed the challenge to that ballot because it was filed too late.
Guidelines from the Pennsylvania Department of State advised that military-style dating is acceptable, Concepcion said.
“Well, if you know anybody who’s in the military, that’s what they’re ingrained to do,” Dershem noted. “They write the date a certain way. I’m not going to disenfranchise somebody because they use military ballot language. And until somebody specifically says to me that that’s wrong, I’m going to consider it right because I’m not going to disenfranchise those folks.”
No other challenges to mail ballots remain in the county.
Both Dershem and Higgins pleaded for state legislators and Gov. Josh Shapiro to clarify Act 77, the law that authorized no-excuse mail-in voting in Pennsylvania, to minimize the difficulties and legal challenges that have burdened counties since it went into effect with the 2020 election.
Dershem said he wants to “move on and not have the courts decide for us, either days before an election or in the middle of the election counting process, how we are supposed to do business.”
Higgins urged the state to allow pre-canvassing — or the opening of ballots — before Election Day, as is the process in many other states.
“It’s very difficult to take a department with four permanent staff and take it up to almost 1,000 people on general Election Day, especially in presidential years,” Higgins said. “It’d be great if we could have people start at least a few days beforehand slitting open the mail-in and absentee envelopes.”
Much of the current legal wrangling at the state level over ballot counting centers on the U.S. Senate race between Republican Dave McCormick and Democratic incumbent Sen. Bob Casey. McCormick leads Casey by about 17,000 votes, within the margin to trigger an automatic statewide recount.
Centre County is scheduled to perform its recount for the Senate race on Wednesday and Thursday at the Willowbank Building in Bellefonte. Counties are required to complete the recount by Nov. 26 and report the results to the Department of State by Nov. 27.
“We still have one more recount to do for the U.S. Senate race … but we have, I think, run a very square election,” Dershem said. “The numbers are coming out very good. And hopefully the numbers on Thursday come out perfect. And we can move on to another election cycle next year.”
