MARK NANCE/Sun-Gazette County voter services and information services staff count mail in ballots at the Voter Serivices office during election day Tuesday.

Voter turnout was leisured Tuesday, allowing elections staff time to complete the high-volume of mail-in ballots, said county officials.

With both COVID-19 restrictions and new state laws governing mail-in ballots, Forrest Lehman, director of elections and registration, said “We did as well as we could under the circumstances.”

The canvassing of mail-in ballots began at 7 a.m., and concluded at about 4:45 p.m., said Lehman.

Of the more than 10,500 voters registered for mail-in ballots, about 7,000 were received by voter services, said Lehman.

Those votes were to be tallied beginning at 8 p.m. At that time, the polls were close – mail-in ballots unreceived by then are ineligible.

About a dozen workers were taking the neatly-lined mail-in ballots from their shipping containers before quickly and diligently preparing the ballots for scanning, as others routinely took those collections to the scanner for counting.

“It started out kind of slow, but as the people got comfortable with it, they started getting through a lot more quickly,” he said. “We weren’t sure what we were capable of going into today, but they showed us over there.”

“That’s really been our best success story of the day,” he added.

Most of those workers came from other county departments or the Pre-Release Center.

“It was really a team lift, we couldn’t do it without all of them,” said Lehman.

In-person voting at the polls was the priority Tuesday, however, said Lehman. If there had been any issues with understaffing at the various voting wards, staff was to be pulled from counting the mail-in ballots to help, he continued.

“It’s been kind of slow there,” he said. “We’re just going by the call volume and what we’re hearing from judges out there, but it seems like the turnout is a little lighter.”

This was expected, however, as under the circumstances of COVID-19, about 17 percent of the voters in Lycoming County opted for a mail-in ballot.

“We are having a lot of people who did not return a mail ballot or didn’t receive it in time,” he said. “They are going to vote in person and they all have to do a provisional ballot.”

Twenty provisional ballots were filled out in the 2016 primary, but this year voter services may see up to 3,500 after many have been delayed or lost in the United States Postal Services, said Lehman.

“The big issue we’re seeing here today is the number of provisional ballots and shortage of provisional balloting materials,” he said in the midst of the Tuesday primary.

Those ballots are easy for the public to fill out, but take much longer to count for voting services staff who must conduct research to determine if it can be counted, said Lehman.

To further prolong the process, procedural ballots cannot begin to be counted until after the election takes place, because according to state law, an absentee or mail-in ballot must be counted over the provisional ballot cast by the same person.

“So even though we’re engaging in this Herculean effort to get all these ballots and get them counted, the reason why people may not know what happened in some of these contested elections is because, all over the state, we have a huge bubble of provisional ballots that nobody is able to look at right away,” said Lehman.

The tally must also start to be counted within three days of the election, according to state law. Lehman said his staff will begin at about 8 a.m. today, but must also complete other duties such as payroll for elections workers.

In past elections voter services would get an official result within seven to 10 days, said Lehman.

“If we have some help with those provisionals we may be able to stay roughly on track, but if we have a lot of them it’s just going to take some more time,” he said.

If voter services receive 1,000 to 1,500 provisional ballots, it may take up to a week to finish counting them all, he said.

“It’s hard to say” when the counting may conclude, said Lehman.

“We’re going to have to play it by ear because, again, we’ve never attempted this before – we don’t have a baseline to compare,” he said.