Centre County will receive more than $500,000 in election funding from the commonwealth for the second year in a row.
The county Board of Commissioners on Tuesday voted unanimously to accept the $529,688 from Pennsylvania’s Elections Integrity Grant Program, which was signed into law in August 2022 and allocated $45 million for counties statewide.
Centre County received $540,000 in 2022. The small dip in this year’s award is because allotments are based on voter registration numbers, and the county had a small decline after removing five-year inactive voters from the rolls in January, Director of Elections and Voting Registration Beth Lechman said.
The funding can be used for the period of Aug. 9, 2023, to June 30, 2024 and will cover expenses for the November 2023 election and the May 2024 primary election. The grant money can be used for a variety of purposes, including costs related to voter registration, staffing, Election Day operations, equipment security and reporting.
“I don’t foresee us having any problem expending these funds,” Lechman said. “We expended all the funds we received last year in a timely manner.”
Centre County’s 2023 budget for elections is $1.3 million.
Board of Commissioners Chair Mark Higgins thanked the state legislature for providing money to counties to cover election expenses, noting that the cost of administering elections is “becoming a significant amount of money.”
“I’m glad that this money is coming in,” Vice Chair Amber Concepcion added. “It will help us recruit paid staff to help us run elections so that we’ve got enough people who are there either at the polls or helping with the ballot-counting process.”
Funding is available to all 67 Pennsylvania counties, but they must apply to receive it (four chose not to in 2022) and it does come with some requirements. Counties must begin pre-canvassing — the process of opening and preparing mail-in and absentee ballots — at 7 a.m. on Election Day and continue without interruption until completed. Once the polls close at 8 p.m. on Election Day, they are required to count all mail-in and absentee ballots received without interruption until the count is complete.
The law does not allow counties to begin pre-canvassing before Election Day.
Counties also have additional reporting requirements, including posting on their websites by 12:01 a.m. after the election an unofficial number of mail and absentee ballots received, and submitting to the Secretary of State for posting on the Department of State website the “outcome of any post-election audit required under the election code.”
Lechman said Centre County met the grant requirements during the first year of funding.
Centre County Preparing for Possible Primary Date Change
Last week, the state House moved a bill that would change Pennsylvania’s 2024 primary election date from April 23 to April 2. It’s unclear how the Senate will handle to proposal after it passed a bill to move the primary to March 19. That bill was rejected in the House.
Efforts to move the primary came about because the currently scheduled date of April 23 conflicts with Passover and is late in the presidential primary cycle. Counties, however, have expressed concerns about the logistics of such a change in a short timeframe.
Lechman said Centre County is preparing for the possibility of a date change.
“We are definitely working on that. I’ve reached out to the Penn Stater (which serves as one of two vote-by-mail processing sites) to find out their ability for the two proposed dates, have reached out to other locations if they’re not available,” Lechman said. “So yes we are moving forward with making plans depending on the two dates. Then we will also make our poll workers aware of that in our training at the end of October.”
She added that a change could incur some additional costs associated with potentially moving some polling locations and training additional poll workers, since already-trained workers may still be wintering elsewhere or otherwise unavailble.
