Despite the controversy surrounding mailed ballots in Pennsylvania, the best way to describe Allegheny County’s planned process of opening and tabulating mail-in and absentee ballots is to call it a well-oiled machine.
The county’s base of operations for the collecting and counting of such ballots this year is an 80,000 square-foot warehouse in Pittsburgh’s North Side, across the street from the Pennsylvania Station Post-Office.
The building has been monitored 24/7 since mail-in ballots started being collected by the county and 39 security cameras, and multiple guards, are posted around the property. State and local police officers also are assigned duty there on Election Day, which includes setting up roadblocks along a section of Pennsylvania Avenue where the warehouse is located.
When media members arrive at the massive building, they are led through a designated side door, checked in, patted down and personally escorted to a small observation area almost directly in the middle of the facility.
To the east and south of the observation area, behind a brick wall and an enormous tarp, respectively, workers sort and open the nearly 350,000 mail-in and absentee ballots received by the county as of 8 p.m. on Election Day.
Although media members are not permitted anywhere in the building other than the observation area and restroom, and in fact must be escorted each time a member wants to enter or exit the warehouse, county officials provided a large monitor set to several security-camera feeds that display parts of the process.
The mail-in and absentee ballots received by the county are stored in a secured, fenced-in cage directly behind a brick wall.
Mail-in ballots postmarked by 8 p.m. on Election Day but received by the county up to three days later, will be separated and sorted by the day they were received from Nov. 4 through Nov. 6, based upon guidance from the Pennsylvania Department of State.
At 7 a.m. on Election Day, about 200 workers began the arduous process of checking the outer envelopes of each individual ballot by hand to ensure that they are signed, dated and that the names on the envelopes match before they are moved along to the next stage. An envelope with any issue is pulled aside and evaluated by a senior county elections official.
The envelopes, still unopened at this point, are transferred to a brand new, approximately $700,000 BlueCrest letter opener that automatically unseals and sorts each envelope by voting district.
After they are unsealed, the privacy envelopes within the outer envelopes are taken out and inspected by a separate group of workers. These envelops are then taken to several smaller letter openers nearby to be unsealed.
Once these are unsealed, the ballots inside each privacy envelope are removed and flattened out by workers by hand, so as to be more easily read by the ballot scanner.
The ballots are then finally taken to be counted by one of the county’s 10 ballot scanners, which at maximum speed can each process about 300 ballots per minute. Each scanner feeds its data to an encrypted, single-use USB drive that, once full, is removed and taken to another secure room where it is stored with the others until the tabulation process begins, which is prevented by state law until 8 p.m. on Election Day.
Once scanned, the ballots are stored in another fenced-in cage, across the building from the cage storing the unopened envelopes.
Nearly 600 workers from 17 different county departments are involved in the process, spread across three shifts of about 150-200 people each from 6:30 a.m. on Tuesday until 7 a.m. on Wednesday. Every worker on the premises is required to wear a face mask.
Technicians from each of the companies that provided the various machines also are onsite to provide spare parts or maintenance if needed.
Although the initial evaluation of the outer envelopes was slower than expected, and a few ballot scanners have had some jamming issues, the process as of 9 p.m. was relatively smooth, according to county Elections Divisions Manager David Voye. Mr. Voye said that he was “very happy so far” of the operation overall on Tuesday night.
Nick Trombola: ntrombola@post-gazette.com
First Published: November 4, 2020, 3:29 a.m.
