PA State Department blames city for provisional ballot mess

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PA State Department blames city for provisional ballot mess

POSTED: Friday, January 18, 2013, 1:23 PM

Remember how thousands of Philadelphians had to cast provisional ballots on Election Day and no one could figure out why? The Pennsylvania Department of State has chimed in with its own analysis, based on a sample of 5,203 provisional ballot names sent over by the City Commissioners, who run Philly elections. It found that just 3 percent of those forced to vote provisionally should have been; the rest ought to have been able to vote on a machine.

They found that 5,125 of the names were in voter records. Of those, 157 were in regular poll books and 4,327 were in supplemental poll books, which the city generated; all of those people should have been able to vote using machines, not on provisional ballots. Another 564 voters should have been in the poll books but weren't, mostly because they were underage and the city apparently didn't use a necessary program to change them to active status. (Although the state does concede that there was one poor soul of the last name "Null" who apparently was excluded from the database for coding reasons.)

The memo from Secretary of the Commonwealth Carol Aichele concludes: "If Philadelphia had implemented the underage utility in our system, had the correct supplemental provisional ballot date range and the poll workers used both the regular poll books and supplemental poll books correctly, out of the 5,203 provisional ballot names we checked, they would have only had 155 provisional ballots cast. We stand ready to work with the City Commissioners to help them prevent similar issues from occurring in future elections."

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