ALLENTOWN, Pa. — Lehigh County officials certified the local 2024 election results for the first time Wednesday, moving through the mundane process of concluding a wild election cycle.
The Lehigh County Board of Elections voted unanimously to certify 191,158 ballots, including 57,798 mail-in ballots and 2,810 provisional ballots. The board intentionally left out 211 provisional ballots that sported voter flaws — 184 ballots that were signed once instead of the required two times and 27 that were not placed in the mandatory secrecy envelope.
Provisional ballots are paper ballots cast by voters whose eligibility is in question. Examples include voters who requested a mail-in ballot but tried to cast an in-person ballot or people who do not appear in the poll books. County officials later examine these ballots individually to determine if the vote should be counted or discarded.
The fate of the 211 provisional ballots will be debated next month in response to a lawsuit filed by U.S. Sen. Bob Casey's campaign and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Casey trails Republican challenger Dave McCormick in one of the nation's tightest races. Unofficial results show McCormick leading Casey by 16,581 votes statewide, but Casey contends there are enough uncounted provisional votes across Pennsylvania that he still has a path to victory.
In a lawsuit filed Monday in Lehigh County Court, the Casey campaign argued the county violated voters' constitutional rights by not counting the 211 ballots. Ballots cannot be discounted due to errors by government officials, and no voter would go through the process of requesting a provisional ballot only to ignore the instructions, according to the suit.
"Every step of the provisional voting process is mediated by poll workers, thus procedural faults in that process are almost always attributable to poll worker error," the suit alleges.
The suit is essentially the opposite of the one filed against Northampton County by the McCormick campaign. The Northampton County Election Commission voted to allow provisional ballots sporting only one signature, which the campaign argues violates the state election code.
Both counties opted to count provisional ballots lacking the signature of a staff worker, ruling a voter should not be disenfranchised due to an error by a county employee.
The razor-thin margins of the U.S. Senate race triggered an automatic statewide recount this week. Lehigh County Chief Clerk of Elections Tim Benyo said Lehigh County's recount should wrap up by Friday.
Lehigh County has already conducted its state-mandated risk-limiting audit of the election results, Benyo said. It found no discrepancies, he said. The audit is in place to ensure the voting scanners accurately tallied the paper ballots.
Lehigh County's meeting lasted about 10 minutes, long enough for local election officials to draw bipartisan praise. Michael O'Hare, the Republican representative on the board, and Drummond Taylor, a representative of the Lehigh County Democratic Commission, commended Benyo, Deputy Solicitor Sarah Murray and the elections staff for their work leading up to the election and canvassing the results.
