Editorial: Election hiccups shouldn’t shake faith
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Ideally, the closer we get to Nov. 3, the more election issues should be ironed out.
Problems should have been anticipated, solutions planned, outcomes corrected. Preparations, after all, have been underway for years.
In Westmoreland County, the $7.1 million elections machines were ordered in 2019. They had verifiable paper trails and went for a test drive in the spring primary.
And that election in June — delayed from April because of the coronavirus pandemic — pointed to issues with the mail-in ballots. As the state encouraged mail-in voting to increase social distancing, more people did request and cast them. But while more populous Allegheny County’s counting process went smoothly, Westmoreland took several days to count the 40,000 ballots.
But they learned, upping the number of counting devices for November. That’s a move that is supposed to reduce the number of additional employees needed for counting from 60 to 40.
All good, right? Well, not every change is going that well. In September, the county contracted with Midwest Presort Mailing Services to handle mailing ballots to voters.
And on Thursday, the county announced that ballots that should have been mailed out last week were missing in action.
That’s a big problem — and one that says a lot about expecting the unexpected. For months, state and national concerns have been about whether the postal system could handle the volume of ballots being returned. No one seemed worried that ballots couldn’t get out.
County Solicitor Melissa Guiddy says the issue has been identified, and more than 58,000 ballots will be making their way to registered voters.
Commissioners also have to make another decision. Will there be drop boxes for those ballots in case voters don’t trust that the postal service will come through on getting them postmarked in time? What about satellite election offices, as Allegheny County has authorized?
The question is on hold because of another unexpected wrinkle — Commissioner Doug Chew’s covid diagnosis, which closed down some county offices and shuffled meetings including the election board.
Naysayers and defeatists will say that the problems prove nothing can be done to ensure electoral security. But if there is ever a time to see the ballot box as half full, this is it.
There is no more optimistic act than voting. Whether it is a vote for change or a vote to stay the same, every vote is a vote to continue forward. People who have given up don’t care about casting ballots.
And every step the state or the county takes to make those votes possible and make counting them efficient and effective is a step in the right direction.
Nov. 3 is still a few weeks away. This is unlikely to be the last hiccup in the voting process, much as we might all hope it is.
The important thing is that the mistakes keep being acknowledged and corrected.