Judge Extends Mail Ballot Deadline in Bucks County, PA, After Trump Lawsuit
Pennsylvania doesn’t have traditional early voting. It has in-person mail-in ballot voting.
A Pennsylvania judge extended the in-person voting options in Bucks County due to long lines and complaints that selection officials were turning people away.
Pennsylvania judge orders extended early voting in Bucks County after finding local officials unlawfully turned away voters who had properly applied for a mail-in ballot. https://t.co/vPV5dNchhp
— Sunny (@sunnyright) October 30, 2024
Former President Donald Trump’s campaign filed a lawsuit after the complaints.
OK, here’s the thing about Pennsylvania: Early voting isn’t what you think it is in other states.
It’s called “on-demand” voting. It started when the state passed Act 77 in 2019, which established mail-in voting.
This early voting takes place at county election offices, not polling stations. From The Federalist:
Voters who choose the mail-in ballot must request a ballot by the deadline — Tuesday, Oct. 29.
Once completed, the voter may mail it in any mailbox; drop it in a county ballot drop box; or, the preferred method for many voters, fill it out on the spot and hand it in at the counter of the county election office. That has become known as on-demand mail-in voting.
This ballot is stored with all the other mail-in ballots and counted with them, but for those voters who would not trust an envelope of $1,000 cash in the mail, handing the ballot to an election worker feels more secure.
Despite the Oct. 29 deadline to request a mail-in ballot, voters still have until election day, Nov. 5, to return it to the election office by hand, mail, or drop box.
So it’s in-person mail-in ballot voting:
The voter gets to the counter, asks for a mail-in ballot request form, and fills out the form. There is no poll book, so the election worker runs the individual’s information through the Statewide Uniform Registry of Electors (SURE) computer system to make sure he is a registered voter, eligible to vote in the county. Then they tell the SURE System this voter has requested a mail-in ballot, print a ballot specific to the voter’s precinct, and hand the voter the mail-in packet, which includes two envelopes and the ballot.
The voter fills out the ballot, seals it in the inner and outer envelopes, signs and dates it, and hands it back to the election worker.
To move things along, voters are given a space to step to the side and fill out the ballot. They do have the option of placing it in the drop box outside the building, mailing it, or bringing the completed ballot back another day.
The counties only prepared for the “mail-in ballot requests and accept ‘on demand’ mail-in ballot returns.” The Federalist explains it comes down to the signature polling book:
On Election Day, extra staff and volunteers are manning polling places across the county. Voters sign their names in an electronic or paper poll book.
To prepare the poll book, counties must give the state all voter information by midnight on Oct. 29, James T. O’Malley, a Bucks County spokesman told The Federalist.
Only eligible voters’ names go in the book. So if you received a mail-in ballot, your name does not go in the poll book. It is a guard against people voting twice.
On Election Day, all the ballots are printed, and after voters sign the poll book, they are handed a ballot, walk to a voting booth, mark their ballots, and then place them in the scanner to complete the voting process.
Bucks County spokesman James T. O’Malley told The Federalist that mail-in voting has caused massive lines because they only “have one printer that can print these ballots” and only one ballot at a time.
WHY DO YOU THINK BUCKS COUNTRY SHUT DOWN VOTING AT 1:45 INSTEAD OF ALLOWING CITIZENS TO VOTE UNTIL 4:30 P.M.? ANY IDEA?
Bucks County is a county in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is shutting down at 1:45 P.M and was supposed to stay open untIl 4:30 P.M. pic.twitter.com/FjSCgHcgHE
— BelannF (@BelannF) October 30, 2024
This is NOT Venezuela. This is Pennsylvania in the United States of America, where cops are blocking most likely Trump voters from voting
This happened at 4:38pm in Bucks Countg, well before 5pm when polls close
DO NOT LEAVE THAT LINE. STAY & VOTE
pic.twitter.com/3tI7NgEBOx— George (@BehizyTweets) October 29, 2024
“Most days that this on demand voting process has been going on, we’ve had to go out and cut off the line at a certain point,” continued O’Malley. “We estimate that this process takes 12 minutes per voter from the time they get to the front of the line. That does not include the time you wait to get to the front of the line, which could be hours. They’re able to calculate how many people they could serve within regular business hours, and then at a certain point they cut off the line and they say, this is the last people we can serve today for on demand, mail-in voting.”
Oh, look. The AP blamed the Trump campaign when both campaigns have been telling their voters to vote early:
But Bucks County, like other counties in Pennsylvania, allows voters to apply for a mail-in ballot in person at the elections office and receive it there, a time-consuming process strained to the limit by Trump’s exhortations to his supporters to get out and vote before Tuesday’s deadline. Voters can also fill it out and hand it in at the office.
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Comments
“handing the ballot to an election worker feels more secure.”
If feels that way but is it? Who are these people who are not really normal election people where there are requirements of multi party participation to reduce the chances of bad actions.
Most paid county office staff are Democrats even in Republican counties. I am not sure I trust them to not try to protect us from MAGA Nazi Trump.
That requirement of multi-party participation is not what you think it is.
I’m usually a poll worker in NYC, where each station must be manned by two inspectors, one representing the D party and one the R. But that doesn’t mean the inspectors are actually supporters of those parties, or even registered in them (not that that means anything). All it means is that each inspector is assigned to a party for the day, and supposed to represent the party’s interest in an honest election.
Since both parties are supposed to be equally interested in an honest election, all it really means is that both inspectors are supposed to watch each other to keep everything honest. Of course if they’re both dishonest, and both actually Dems, there’s nothing to prevent them from colluding to benefit the Dems.
Where I work I have never yet come across a fellow poll worker who seems dishonest. I’ve never had to contend with a partner who is trying to cheat. But that’s only where I am. I doubt it’s true in all neighborhoods.
Seeing that you claim to be an R who is registered as a D, you’d be a prime suspect, no?
No. I’m honest, as seems to be every poll worker I’ve worked with. But I live in a white liberal neighborhood. Everyone around me is a dedicated Democrat, but a sincere one. I expect that the fraud happens in neighborhoods with different demographics, where all the poll workers, including the site coordinator, are in on it and no one cares. But that’s just a guess.
One hears of areas, particularly in Philadelphia, where R poll watchers are threatened until they leave in fear for their safety. But of course I haven’t seen this with my own eyes.
Again, how someone registers is no indication of anything. It’s completely normal for a person to register with one party and vote for another.
Party registration is only for the purpose of voting in that party’s primary, so it depends on whether only one party has primaries where you are, and also whether there’s ever a difference between the contenders in those primaries.
For years I was registered R, and therefore couldn’t vote in D primaries, because I didn’t care who won the D primary, they were all Democrats. At least with a R registration I could vote in statewide and presidential R primaries. I changed my registration when there was a serious challenge to my local communist representative, from someone to her left, and a DINO joined the race in the hope that the two of them would split the leftist vote and he might make it past them both. It didn’t work out that way, but I registered D to support him, and haven’t seen a reason to switch back.
“I expect that the fraud happens in neighborhoods with different demographics, where all the poll workers, including the site coordinator, are in on it and no one cares.”
Racist dog whistle!
(Just yanking your chain, Milhouse. But less polite company would say that and mean it, or at least pretend to mean it.)
I was a poll-watcher for a while in Chicago. Same thing.
The whole mail-in voting, early voting, etc. has become a farce. The only secure method of voting is in person, paper ballots, valid ID, on election day. We need a constitutional amendment.
Mail-in voting, early voting, etc., was a farce from day one, and, more than that, an intentional connivance by the vile Dhimmi-crats that was transparently intended to facilitate/enable fraud and chicanery in voting and vote tabulation, and, to delay timely reporting of voting results (thus facilitating fraud).
To be fair, even without mail-in and early voting, the fact that our voting system does not have the ability to be audited makes it susceptible to cheating.
Even if it could be audited good luck getting a judge to permit an audit. All lawsuits intended to gather evidence of wrongdoing in 2020 got shot down. Our elections are the most fraud-free in the world, and you will not be permitted to search for evidence of them being otherwise.
The only mail in voting that should occur is by people who physically can not get to a poll. Military and State Department overseas, hospital and nursing home.
Don’t think you need a constitutional amendment but a law passed by Congress and the senate enforcing certain requirements for all Federal elections, like photo ID, voting in person and on paper.
The constitution gives Congress the authority to regulate congressional elections, but since presidential elections are creations of the states Congress doesn’t really have any power over them. The Electoral Count Act tries to get around that by bribing states into complying with Congress’s wishes, but a state that wanted to defy Congress could probably get away with it.
What was the Save Act (or what ever it was called) all about if it wasn’t about controlling how federal elections are run??
You must win by the rules that exist now in order to be able to change the rules to something better later
And that’s where they’ve got our collective ass. We’re all screwed. It’s all over but the… crying.
The Second Amendment is a rule that exists now.
Bob Tate of the Alabama Gazette even explains how it is applicable here.
From where we’re sitting right now and the info that’s available on early voting in the swing states, they don’t have our asses at the moment. At the moment we’re actually looking to sweep, if the polling is even close to correct, and judging from the way the candidates and campaigns are acting I’d say the polling is even more favorable than what we can see.
I’m not saying to count your chickens, but it’s way too early to throw in the towel. If we can make it lopsided enough, they won’t be able to steal it.
Trump had several states won in 2020 until late night shenanigans happened. I foresee that being the state of play again.
Gosh ‘only one printer to print ballots…’ in Bucks County PA which just happened to have flipped their voter registration advantage to the GoP this year. Bucks isn’t a low population area it has 650K residents making the 4th most populous County in PA. The failure to position adequate resources to accommodate all these methods of voting other than in person on election day is a deliberate choice. So was illegally cutting off the access and refusing service to those already in line at 5PM. It is long established that those voters ‘in line at close’ must be allowed an opportunity to finish voting.
That is generally the rule in all government offices. If you’re in line when the clock strikes closing, you still get to complete your business. I used to take advantage of this like crazy at the dmv. Screw spending all day, I showed up a half an hour before they closed and I was out of there in record time.
They tried to put a ‘line ends here’ sign out before 2 PM, and were recorded doing it.
I’m amused by the fact that ballots can be printed on a printer. Well, I suppose the ballots have to be printed on “special” paper – which nobody could possibly obtain improperly.
For early voting they have to be printed individually, because each voter needs a ballot for their election district, or whatever your state calls the smallest electoral division. On election day all districts are manned and you have to come to your own district (at least that’s how it is in NYC), so we get preprinted ballots for just our district, so checking a voter in and giving them a ballot can take a minute or less.
The mess in AZ four years ago was caused because they decided that you could vote at any polling place in the county, so each place had to be able to print a ballot for every district within the county, so they had to do it this way and it takes forever.
Actually it depends on the type of voting machines you’re using. Here they give you a pre-printed card with a barcode and they give you a blank ballot. They scan the barcode into the voting machine and then compare the information against your voter info to make sure the system is presenting the correct ballot. You then feed in the blank ballot, make your selections, double-check and confirm your selections then hit print. You then take your newly printed ballot and feed it into the tabulator standing by the door and they hand you an “I voted” sticker on the way out the door.
My county has less than a 10th of Bucks County residents and we have 2 early voting sites and Voter ID.
Here in Bama we really only have in person election day voting, Military/Overseas ballots. You can get an ‘absentee’ ballot for a medical issue; big BUT you gotta present your own letter + a letter.from a Physician describing exactly what makes it impossible to vote in person +an application + you must designate who among Spouse, Parents, Adult Child or Adult Sibling you authorize to turn in the ballot by hand (no mailing) to the Clerk by noon on election day……and all that crap must have 3rd party witnesses and go through a notary….
My home is also a 10th of Bucks County and we have one early voting area and ID requirement. My wife and I were in and out in 5 minutes, and there was a strong turnout.
>> So was illegally cutting off the access and refusing service to those already in line at 5PM.<<
But the way I understood the situation that isn’t what they were doing. They were using law enforcement (illegally I might add*) to shutdown the early voting hours before the actual closing time using the “we only have one printer to print ballots and it takes on average 12 minutes for each voter to complete the process” excuse”. So they said, we can do X number of voters by closing time so we will end the line at the number and turn away all others.
* PA election law restricts law enforcement to remain outside of a 100 foot perimeter of the entrance to a voting place with three exceptions. The first being if the law enforcement officer is personally voting; the second is that when the polling place is located in a building that also houses a police station: and the third when they are summoned to preserve the peace.
Source:
Guidance on Rules in Effect at the Polling Place on Election Day (PDF)
The Concept is mail in voting is designed to facilitate making voting easier and faster, thus increasing turnout.
However, the hurdles of requesting a ballot, and mailing a ballot appear to require more time and effort that just going to the polling station to vote.
fwiw – Texas as two weeks of early voting with manned polling stations (albeit with fewer locations) but is very simple. Just show up with valid drivers license.
The concept of mail-in-voting also entails a much lower degree of control that only valid ballots are cast, and integrity of secrecy of each voter’s vote. These are meaningful trade-offs, and of course, the media never talks about those.
But if fewer locations are manned, then how do they get around the need for multiple ballots at each location? Or do you still have to go to one location that covers what would normally be 5 or 10, so they have preprinted ballots for those 5 or 10 locations and no others?
I lived in El Paso for a decade and can speak on how it done in El Paso and likely the rest of TX. Within the early voting period they collapse the usual multiple election day locations within each precinct down to a one or two. In my precinct there were three locations for in person Election Day voting; Elementary School, Fire Station and public Library but early in person voting was done at only one location. The County did a good job of publicising times, dates, locations online and via local newspaper, TV, radio. Never had any issues with outages, irregularities or waiting times.
A ballot in the hands of a leftist is like a gun in the hands of a leftist
the left keeps winning
rank choice voting
cumulative voting
mail in voting as a normal way to vote
non citizens voting in “local” elections
they are right….its all fluid…gender the constitution prison sentencing and on and on it goes
None of these are leftist ideas, or necessarily benefit the left.
If they didn’t benefit the left, they wouldn’t be pushing for them.
The push for them mostly isn’t coming from the left. It’s coming from all over.
Huh? I can maybe see the first two being a bit more favored (stupidly) by both sides, but where have you seen Republican support for mail-in voting and non-citizen voting?
Serious question, because I haven’t seen any support for either of these where I live.
“Only eligible voters’ names go in the book. So if you received a mail-in ballot, your name does not go in the poll book. It is a guard against people voting twice.”
This is incorrect. Your name still goes in the book. But there is a notation that you voted via mail.
Prior to 2019, the mail in ballots (which at the time were pretty rare) were sent directly to the precinct. They had an outer envelope with the voter’s name and a blank envelope inside containing the actual ballot. At the end of the day, you opened all the envelopes with names on them and shuffled the blank envelopes. Once they were shuffled enough you couldn’t tell whose was whose, the blank envelopes would be opened and put with the other ballots.
You could come in and vote in person if you had voted absentee. If you did that, your absentee ballot was pulled and spoiled. You signed the book, voted like normal, and went on your way. Everything was accounted for at the precinct level. All ballots had to be accounted for. Tallies were printed off and posted. Poll watchers could see everything. There was transparency.
Now, all that has changed. All of the mail in ballots go to the central county location. The precincts never see them. All they get is a notation in the poll book that the person voted via mail. We had people come in in 2020 and 2022 who the book said they voted by mail, but who were adamant they had not. They get to vote via provisional ballot, but since there’s no way to actually account for “their” mail in ballots anymore (they’ve already been opened and counted), they’re basically disenfranchised.
The results from the precinct are posted after the voting, but then an unknown number of votes are added by the county voting office. No way for you to account for them.
It’s a terrible system, made for cheating.
many dems in these bigggg blue cities are going to vote by “mail” and then come in and vote again
they have their own “guarding” the hen house
the media wont report “over 100% voted and the popular vote count will insure another lefty talking point that the Electoral College must go
by any means necessary
means just that
No precinct in the USA has ever had more than 100% turnout. It just doesn’t happen.
I’m not sure where one would find that nugget of information — you’d have to have voting lists of every single precinct for every election. Perhaps you’ve done your homework.
But it’s not necessary to have one’s favored precincts vote 110% for one’s favored candidate. In an age where about half the people vote in a presidential election year, and about 10% vote in a school board election, nudging the return in the precincts one controls by 10 points (however you do that) is usually good enough.
They do have 90+% turnouts. Black districts in Florida are particularly prone to this marker of fraud.
Who is running that show?? The increased traffic at the election office should have been expected. Get some extra printers and tell the staff they will be working extra hours the 2 weeks leading up to the election and to arrange the child care and carpool accordingly.
The AP can always be counted upon to happily carry leftist water. I respectfully apologize for stating the obvious.
But of course. AP is a branch of the Democrat Party.
“We estimate that this process takes 12 minutes per voter from the time they get to the front of the line. That does not include the time you wait to get to the front of the line, which could be hours. They’re able to calculate how many people they could serve within regular business hours, and then at a certain point they cut off the line and they say, this is the last people we can serve today for on demand, mail-in voting.”
“But Bucks County, like other counties in Pennsylvania, allows voters to apply for a mail-in ballot in person at the elections office and receive it there, a time-consuming process strained to the limit by Trump’s exhortations to his supporters to get out and vote before Tuesday’s deadline.”
In other words, election officials weren’t prepared to handle the largest possible number of persons showing up to vote, only the most likely number of persons. That is not Trump’s fault.
That has become known as on-demand mail-in voting.
We just call that “absentee voting” here. Except (when I last did it, 20 years ago) without the mail-in stuff. You went and requested a ballot, then you filled it out, sealed it in the envelope, and handed it back to the clerk. (With all the appropriate checks, of course: ID, signature, checking you off the list, etc.)