Harrisburg, Pa. , A prosecutor’s review of voting problems in Pennsylvania swing counties where ballots were lost last year found no evidence of criminal activity or purposeful efforts to prevent voting, according to a new report blaming inexperienced observers.
The 24-page review by Luzerne District Attorney Sam Sanguedoles said only one Election Bureau supervisor had more than a month’s experience when voting took place in November — and that person had only been there about a year. He said inexperience and inadequate training have created a vicious cycle.
Luzern was won by Democrat Josh Shapiro in the November contest for governor by barely one percentage point. In the most recent presidential primaries in the northeastern Pennsylvania county, Donald Trump handily defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020.
“As the workforce and experience dwindle, work is pooled among fewer and fewer remaining workers or new workers, making each person more voluntary, the job more stressful and the position less attractive to potential employees,” they said in the report. which was also signed by two of his deputy prosecutors and five county detectives.
Sanguedolce said on Tuesday that meetings are underway about next steps, including “how to move forward and how to prevent this from happening again”. This could include deploying county staff in other departments to help with the election, as well as potentially hiring a consultant to improve procedures.
What Sanguedolce’s report called a “catastrophic oversight” that resulted in an Election Day shortfall of ballots in Luzerne, a swing county in northeastern Pennsylvania, was the subject of a three-hour hearing by the US House Administration Committee in March.
Ballot problems prompted a judge to keep the polls open for two additional hours, contributed to delays in the reporting of election results, and was the subject of controversial public meetings, as well as Sanguedollas’ investigation. He blamed a lack of sufficient paper on the inefficiency and said he found no evidence of a cover-up of any kind.
“Though an obvious mistake, the omission was not intentional,” the report concluded. “The parties involved were clearly distressed by the error and the resulting effects.”
Ballot paper problems caused voting to halt at least briefly in 16 of the county’s 143 polling places, in some cases until they could use emergency or provisional ballots, Sanguedolce’s investigative team found.
The investigators concluded, “The steps to ensure the correct paper was on hand were to order that paper if it was not on hand, and then to load a sufficient amount of that paper into the cabinet.” In previous elections, that duty had been performed by the county’s elections director, a woman in the position for only a few months at the time of the November election.
Sanguedolce, an elected Republican, said there was no basis for some claims that the problems were concentrated in GOP areas.
The review found nothing to support claims that voting machines had been tampered with, that paper was intentionally removed or that there was a deliberate attempt not to order enough ballot paper.
According to the report, “We find the allegation that the shortfall was the result of premeditated planning to be unsupported by any evidence.”
The report said there was validity to a complaint aired during a congressional hearing – that a voter arrived at the Hazleton polling place shortly after 8 p.m., but the doors were locked, even though a judge extended polling until 10 p.m. In that case, the report states that the judge of elections told investigators that no one was able to stop after 8 p.m. and that they were unable to reach the county elections office.
