Harrisburg’s failure to agree to reforms to the Act 77 of 2019 election law that allowed widespread use of mail-in ballots is once again expected to gunk up candidates and citizens learning election results in Bucks County.

Bucks County Commissioner Gene DiGirolamo, a Republican, made the warning recently that results for many high-profile primary races likely won’t be known on election night.

While uncontested candidates and some local contested races will likely have preliminary results by the end of election night, the larger statewide races might not have unofficial results from Bucks County until Wednesday or even after.

“We probably won’t know who the winners are on election night. We probably won’t know until the next day,” he said.

Other counties in the state are facing the same problem.

Mid-term election turnout is expected to be higher than last year’s municipal elections, but not as high as the turnout in 2020.

Higher turnout means more votes cast in person and as part of the expanded vote-by-mail law.

The Bucks County Board of Elections began opening ballot envelopes and preparing them to be counted, as is allowed by law, at 7 a.m. Tuesday. At 8 p.m. when polls close, the county can start tallying up in-person and mail-in ballots.

“We’re going to do this as quickly as possible and as securely as we possibly can,” DiGirolamo said.

Bucks County mailed out just over 60,000 mail-in ballots and had received more than 43,000 as of Tuesday morning, according to county spokesperson James O’Malley.

As election day goes on, more mail-in ballots are expected to be turned in via the postal service and election drop boxes throughout the county.

The Bucks County Board of Elections has brought in additional staff to help collect and tally ballots, but DiGirolamo has said numerous times since 2020 that lawmakers in Harrisburg need to do more.

Vote counting delays have been blamed on the lack of pre-canvassing, which allows election workers to open and scan ballots, but not count the tally until 8 p.m. Many other states that have mail-in voting allow pre-canvassing.

GOP State Rep. Seth Grove, who leads the State Government Committee, pushed forward a bill that would give counties five days of time for pre-canvassing for mail-in voting. The bill passed, but Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf vetoed it because of other included election changes, including requiring voter ID.

The Bucks County Commissioners – two Democrats and one Republican – have called on lawmakers to allow pre-canvassing, especially in the wake of 2020’s delayed results in the presidential race. The delay was used by then-President Donald Trump and his allies to boost misinformation about the outcome of that election.

The Pennsylvania Department of State works with counties to oversee elections in the state. The acting leader of that agency recently made comments on the issue, according to investigative news outlet Spotlight PA:

Acting Secretary of State Leigh Chapman says the restriction in Pennsylvania’s vote-by-mail law is an across-the-board challenge for local election officials.

“One thing that all county election officials in Pennsylvania agree with is the need for pre-canvassing when it comes to vote by mail ballots,” Chapman said at a recent press conference. “You know, states like Florida report their results on Election Night. In Pennsylvania it takes days.”

After Pennsylvania passed Act 77 in 2019, Pennsylvania’s voters proved glad to have the option to vote from home via mail ballots during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the November 2020 election, more than 2.6 million voters opted to vote by mail.

But the pre-canvassing restrictions forced election officials to decide whether to attempt to count in-person votes and mail-in votes on the same day, or to push the mail ballot counting to later.

Election Day is “already a day where there’s a lot of stress and a lot of work going on,” Chapman said.

DiGirolamo said he hopes changes to the election law will allow for candidates and the public to know the winners by the end of election night, and he hopes it can be completed before the 2022 general election in November.

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