Cambria County officials continue working to put a close to last week’s election after issues with the ballots forced them to duplicate ballots onto new ballots that were able to be scanned by the computers.
The unofficial results have not been certified yet, but officials said they hope that will happen Thursday, but they say all election day ballots have officially been counted.
Officials say they finished counting the normal election day votes just after 2 a.m. on Saturday and Monday they finished counting provisional ballots.
Cambria county solicitor Ron Repak Jr. said one reason the vote counting took so long is because they expected about 35,000 ballots originally that would have to hand count or duplicated, but it turned out to be about 65,000 ballots.
He also said there were more than 800 provisional ballots compared to about 30 they have normally. There were much more provisional ballots because the two hours the polls were extended only allowed for provisional votes. About 650 of those are being accepted according to officials.
Officials add that there is still about 130 military and overseas ballots to count, and an audit being done for three precincts in the county, or about two percent of the votes which Repak said they are required to do.
The election board will be meeting again at the county courthouse Thursday at 3 p.m. and said the objective is for those to be done by that meeting.
Officials continue assuring all ballots were counted correctly and say possibly the toughest part of the last week is not really having a precedent for what to do in this situation.
“I think the challenge is never done it before, never seen it before and just trying to understand, how do we develop a process and protocol and a chain of custody,” Repak said. “I think process has been the main. I think communication is something that we’re going to focus on as a priority.”
Repak says when everything is wrapped up for this election an investigation will be done on why the ballots were not able to be scanned by the computer even though officials say ballots they tested worked and the mail in ballots worked, but he says right now they do not have an answer.
