Many Pennsylvania voters are reporting that they still have not received their mail-in ballots days away from the 2024 election. Where they went missing — some in critical deep-red counties — is particularly alarming.
Adams County
In a Q-and-A session about the upcoming election, Pennsylvania's Secretary of State Al Schmidt, who oversees election administration statewide, was informed that dozens of voters in Adams County had applied for a mail-in ballot but did not get one.
Adams is a consistently Republican county. In fact, no Democratic candidate seeking the presidency has won Adams County since Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964. In 2020, Donald Trump won with 66.13 percent of the county's vote to Joe Biden's 32.13 percent. In 2016, Hillary Clinton only held 29.63 percent of the vote, the lowest any Democratic nominee had garnered in the county since George McGovern's failed presidential run 44 years prior.
Mifflin County
Similarly, in Mifflin County, a reliably Republican and pro-Trump stronghold, there's chatter among voters in community forums about the absence of mail-in ballots that have yet to arrive on their doorsteps.
In 2020, 16,670 Mifflin County voters (77.37 percent) picked Trump compared to 4,603 for Biden (21.36 percent). In 2016, 14,050 (76.53 percent) voted for Trump over Clinton, who claimed a measly 3,563 (19.41 percent.) The last time Mifflin County selected a Democratic candidate for president was 1964.
York County
So, where did the missing ballots go?
York, a Republican-majority county, reportedly sent at least 421 mail-in ballots to the incorrect postal addresses. Election hawks, however, suspect that this number is more likely in the thousands.
Voting rights advocates recently discovered a batch of ballots marked "undeliverable" stored on-site in the county's elections office. Election officials reportedly responded by saying they can't control what happens to ballots once they're in the hands of the U.S. Postal Service.
This election year, York County Republicans have enthusiastically adopted mail-in voting, enough that the county's mail-in ballot requests were split almost evenly, with just 52 percent to 48 percent in favor of Democrats, as of Friday, according to an analysis conducted by abc27 News, a Harrisburg-based TV station.
Republican registration in York County currently beats Democrats by about 71,400 signatures. This lead indicates that Donald Trump will outpoll Kamala Harris locally, like in 2020, when Trump won York County by better than a three-to-one vote, The York Daily Record reports. Over the past 40 years, the county's conservatives have continuously out-registered progressives.
Erie County
This is also the case in toss-up Erie, where hundreds of frustrated voters lined up outside the county's elections office this week after anxiously awaiting the arrival of their mail-in ballots that never came — despite ordering them almost a month ago.
Residents told YourErie.com that they stood in line for upwards of four hours to ensure their votes were counted. Meanwhile, calls are pouring in from voters asking where their ballots went, overwhelming the Voter Registration Office's phone system, with some callers reportedly being disconnected.
The county's election officials say that approximately 750 mail-in ballots were misplaced. Two bins of them had been dropped off at a U.S. Postal Service mail-processing facility in Pittsburgh, roughly a two-hour drive south of Erie, but were then somehow shipped to the wrong post office. Those batches of ballots were then stalled for some time, further delaying delivery.
Erie County's clerk of elections Karen Chillcott said the county's Board of Elections is working with the Pennsylvania State Department, Gov. Josh Shapiro's office, and the USPS to "get to the bottom of this" and determine their delivery status.
The county — located in the northwest corner of Pennsylvania — contracted with a third-party vendor based in Akron, Ohio, to handle large-batch mailings. Their mail house, ElectionIQ, previously made a separate mailing mistake just before this blunder, in which its address software malfunctioned, instead printing duplicates and inserting them into the incorrect envelopes. Nearly 300 voters found that they were mailed both their own ballot and another belonging to someone else.
"There's really nothing to see here," the county's Board of Elections chairman Andre Horton, a Democrat on the Erie County Council, said of the mishap. "It's important to remember that not every mistake is nefarious and at the end of the day, we are all humans," the Democracy Defense Project said in support.
As for the pitstop at the Pittsburgh processing plant, that's where Erie-bound mail is processed before being sent out for delivery. So, it appears that that issue originated with the USPS.
In Erie, mail-in voting made all the difference last election.
While other jurisdictions across the country predictably lean left or right, Erie County has "boomeranged" from Democrat to Republican and back between elections in recent cycles. The county twice-backed Barack Obama, then flipped for Donald Trump in 2016, but Joe Biden narrowly reclaimed the county in 2020 (by less than 1,500 votes or 1.03 percentage points, per NPR), thanks largely to mail-in voting.
Trump won the in-person count with 54,420 votes to Biden's 30,646, according to The Erie Times-News. However, Biden gained a massive advantage (more than three-to-one) when the mail-in votes were counted in the days following the election; Biden ultimately had 32,929 mail-in votes (over 75 percent) to Trump's 9,279.
Democrats there enjoyed that edge again in the 2022 midterms.
As a counter-strategy, the county's GOP leadership has been pushing for more Republicans to vote by mail, thereby boosting voter turnout as a whole. Erie County's Republican Party chairman Tom Eddy told NPR that he's been spreading the gospel in the lead-up to Election Day, telling skeptical conservatives that in order to win, they ought to embrace mail-in voting as well.
"I still have people that are adamant against them [mail-in ballots]," Eddy said. "They say, 'Well, it's an avenue for fraud.' And I said, 'Yeah, it could be.' But we've got to play that game. Otherwise, we lose. We can't win an election without them."
Erie, which demographically mirrors the Keystone State's diverse makeup of urban areas, suburban swaths, and rural lands, is a bellwether county known for picking presidents. As the saying goes, whichever way Erie votes, Pennsylvania tends to follow. That's proven true in the past few races.
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