PHILADELPHIA — The Pennsylvania Department of State asked counties Saturday for a partisan breakdown of the undated and wrongly dated mail ballots they’ve received, alarming some local officials who saw the request as inappropriate.
County officials said there’s no reason for the department to need party information on ballot rejections. The department defended its request as “perfectly appropriate” because it has no other way to collect the data and is preparing for possible litigation.
“We have no systematic way of capturing that information, so that’s why we sent the survey to all 67 counties to ask how many undated and how many incorrectly dated ballots do you have, and also broken by party,” Leigh M. Chapman, the acting secretary of state, told reporters Monday. “We know we’ll be asked this question if there’s litigation, so it’s our way to be proactive and ask these counties this information.”
The Department of State emailed the survey to counties in the wake of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s order that undated and wrongly dated ballots be set aside and not counted. (The court clarified that order Saturday.)
Sent with the subject line “URGENT survey,” the form asks counties for the number of undated Democratic ballots, Republican ballots, and other party ballots, and a similar breakdown for incorrectly dated ballots. Counties were asked to provide a total number if a partisan breakdown was not available.
Several county elections officials were alarmed by the request for the partisan breakdown. Elections administrators’ jobs are to run elections in a non-partisan way, they emphasized. They requested anonymity to speak candidly.
“There’s no rational reason to be wanting this,” one county elections official said. “All of us know how many overall ballots we have that fall under these categories, and that’s a perfectly normal thing to ask us, but to ask us these data by party suggests you’re looking for a road map to know which counties are problematic for a specific party.”
Plus, they said, in a general election there are no Democratic or Republican ballots, and using the party registration of the voters might not make sense.
The department asked for counties to fill out the survey by the close of business Monday; several counties told The Philadelphia Inquirer they wouldn’t do so.
“I don’t work for them,” one said. Counties run elections, and the Department of State, which is part of Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf’s administration, oversees them.
The request also prompted pushback from state lawmakers and county commissioners.
The department said in a statement that its request was proper.
“As the department did for the 2022 primary, we are asking for the breakdown by undated vs. incorrectly dated ballots and by political party because we cannot collect that data systematically,” the statement read. “The rationale for including party affiliation was in anticipation of that information being potentially requested from the department and counties in anticipated litigation.”
