Chester County Pennsylvania election officials decided to extend voting hours Tuesday, keeping polls open until 10 p.m. after a disastrous start to the general election.
Poll books where voters sign to show they are a registered voter in the county only listed Republicans and Democrats. The names of some 75,000 independent and unaffiliated voters were not in the book, meaning they could not be verified as a registered voter and had to cast provisional ballots.
When a voter goes to a new polling place for the first time, Pennsylvania requires them to show identification and sign the poll book. After that, their signature from the previous year is in the book and each year they sign near their old signature.
Independent and unaffiliated voters are not allowed to vote in the spring primary election; that is for registered Republicans and Democrats only. One could guess the county was working with a primary poll book in the general election, but that is not clear. Chester election officials promised to return a call to The Federalist Tuesday but never did.
Voters and election watchers were outraged not only for the inconvenience to voters, but for the election integrity weaknesses this situation has created. The problem was reportedly not handled with the same procedure in every case. Some voters were turned away and told to come back later, many cast provisional ballots. Chester County GOP Chairman Raffi Tezian told The Federalist they don’t know if voters who were turned away were all able to return to cast their ballot. And he said precincts ran out of provisional ballot supplies such as secrecy envelopes and stickers to seal them.
“I do have a concern,” Tezian said. “This provisional ballot process was supposed to be the process that had to be followed, but early on, there was a process that we learned, some of the precincts were using, where they allowed people who were not on the poll books, to simply write their name on a blank page in the book, sign their name, and then vote in the traditional fashion. So they were providing inconsistent guidance on voting procedures.”
Proper polling books were delivered to all precincts later in the day. Between 3:45-5 p.m.
“The fact that they would allow an election to go on without the proper poll books is outrageous,” Tezian said. “I don’t know how that occurs in a county of our size. I think this reflects on the dysfunction and mismanagement that we’ve been dealing with under Democrat leadership in our county… we have a single Republican Commissioner, and that’s the only representation we have at the county level.”
Chester has had other recent scandals in county government, he said, citing the county’s Democrat Prothonotary Debbie Bookman, who quit last year under a cloud of financial irregularities, leaving an opening for voters to fill. But the county didn’t put the position on the ballot for the May 20 primary, as Linda Stein of Broad and Liberty reported. And Democrat Treasurer Patricia Maisano, who ran for reelection on this ballot, has made the news for a trouble past relating to her credentials in her part time job as an expert witness in court cases.
“From our perspective, we’re trying to get people trying to get people out to vote and participate, and then this kind of thing happens and it has a chilling effect, right? It’s unfortunate,” Tezian said. “I hope going forward that they do a deep dive and a debrief on this whole thing, because I think that’s going to be critical.”
Beth Brelje is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. She is an award-winning investigative journalist with decades of media experience.
