LEBANON, Pa. — Mail-in ballots have yet to be sent out in Pennsylvania, but following the Secretary of the Commonwealth's certification of the ballot, they are expected to be mailed in the next several weeks.
Counties such as Lebanon County are now preparing to send the ballots by processing applications, while also preparing for the sorting and counting of those ballots when they are mailed back.
"The applications have been coming in since the primary non-stop," said Sean Drasher, the director of the Lebanon County Board of Elections. "We're purging out the old records that need to come out of the voter rolls, so that's people who passed away or moved out of the area. We're also adding all the new ones that are coming in, and they're coming in at a very brisk rate right now. So we are currently at just shy of 12,000 mail-in applications for our county."
Drasher says he expects the county will see a decrease in the approximately 18,000 mail-in ballot applications from 2020, due in large part to there not being a global COVID emergency this year.
The ballots will be sent to applicants following a multi-step verification process.
"To register to vote, you have to give us a driver's license number, SSN is also used, and an address, and then we run it through a series of background checks behind the scenes before we verify you to register," Drasher said. "So once you're registered, there's a second application for the mail-in ballot, and the mail-in ballot is going to make sure that you are registered."
Misconceptions have risen in recent days regarding the process and the timeline following former President Donald Trump’s social media post saying that “early voting” has begun in Pennsylvania.
"Here in PA, we don't have a specific early voting window," Drasher said, referring to the process in other states where in-person voting can begin weeks before the election day. "What we have is, mail-in votes are available once the county certifies them, tests them, and then makes them available, and at that point we are going to mail those out to all the people that requested one, and only those people."
In order to help speed up the processing of the ballots that are mailed, Lebanon County will use a new mail sorter it calls the "Falcon," which is intended to ensure that each mailed envelope has the proper components.
"It’s looking for date and signature on the pieces that come back," Drasher said. "It’s taking a picture of that with an HD camera, and then the laser is measuring the grams of the mail package, and we’re looking to make sure that the secrecy envelope is included with that."
Ballots are expected to be mailed to applicants by the start of October. Once they are mailed back, they cannot be opened or counted by election workers until Election Day on November 5.