EASTON, Pa. — For the first time, Northampton County Council has a dedicated committee overseeing election integrity.
The panel comes after two county elections in four years were complicated by voting machine issues. Its formation shows council intends to take a more hands-on role in scrutinizing how county administration runs elections.
Northampton County’s ExpressVote XL voting machines, manufactured by Omaha-based ES&S, first showed problems during the November 2019 municipal general election when they recorded zero votes for then-candidate Abe Kassis in the race for county judge.
Northampton County's elections are always “legal, fair and accurate.”County Executive Lamont McClure
By scanning paper backup ballots that the machine prints, shows to each voter and ultimately stores, election officials were able to retrieve and record Kassis's votes.
The same paper slips that saved the 2019 election snarled last November’s, after an ES&S employee mislabeled retention races for state Superior Court judges Jack Panella and Victor P. Stabile on the paper backup, swapping their names.
All votes were recorded correctly, county officials said, both digitally and in the machine-readable barcodes at the top of the printout that election officials scan if needed.
County Executive Lamont McClure emphasized that there were no allegations of fraud in either situation, and that all votes were tallied accurately in both cases.
McClure repeated that the county’s elections are always “legal, fair and accurate.”
‘Inherently human endeavors’
Following November’s difficulties and amid rising distrust of U.S. elections despite evidence fraud is exceedingly rare, Northampton County Council this year created the Election Integrity Committee, composed of John Goffredo, Tom Giovanni, Ron Heckman and council President Lori Vargo-Heffner.
In the election integrity committee’s first meeting last week, county Registrar Chris Commini, who leads the elections office, walked the members through a handful of changes the office has made going into next month’s primary election.
In response to reports that poll workers didn’t have enough emergency paper ballots on hand when they were instructed not to use the voting machines for part of election day last November, Commini said he’s increasing how many each precinct will get.
Where each precinct previously received enough emergency ballots for 20% of their registered voters, as required by state law, polling places now will get either 100 emergency ballots or enough for 30% of their voters, whichever is greater.
"Anything humans do can be imperfect. And we will have bumps in the road in elections going forward into the future."Northampton County Executive Lamont McClure
His office also has taken steps to ease communication between county-level election officials and front-line poll workers, supply new privacy screens for voters using paper emergency or provisional ballots, and make mail ballots easier to recognize for voters receiving them, Commini said.
“I understand the necessity to give everybody the feeling of maximum confidence, and that is what we are pledging to do,” McClure said.
Still, he told the committee, “Elections are inherently human endeavors.”
“Anything humans do can be imperfect," he said. "And we will have bumps in the road in elections going forward into the future whether we're using the [ExpressVote] XL to vote, or someday we move to some other system."
