What is Allegheny Co. doing to make sure every vote is counted on time for November election?

ALLEGHENY CO., Pa. — Allegheny County is expecting thousands of voters to vote by mail this November, but there are questions about when election officials can start counting those ballots and if it will cause a delay in election results.

No one is legally allowed to open your mail-in ballot until Election Day, but counties are now pushing legislators to give them more time to process them -- a move that could be the difference between results on election night and results days later.

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Allegheny County Executive Rich Fitzgerald said they are expecting upwards of 500,000 mail-in ballots for the presidential election, which means the county could really use more time to process that many ballots.

“Opening up the envelopes, flattening out the ballots, having them ready to be fed into the high-speed scanners. Those things weren’t even allowed to be done in the spring,” Fitzgerald said.

By law, that time-consuming process cannot begin until 7 a.m. on Election Day, but state legislators from both parties said they are looking for some middle ground.

“They’re able to start that at 7 a.m.,” said State House Majority Leader Kerry Benninghoff. “There’s lots of wrangling going on trying to increase that several days beforehand. On the other hand, there’s dialogue about extending the time after 8 p.m.”

Republicans introducsed a bill this week that would allow mail-in ballot processing to begin three days before the election. However, Gov. Tom Wolf and other Democrats want to see that extended to 21 days.

For counties like Allegheny, finding some kind of compromise is critical to making sure there isn’t a significant delay in election results -- especially in a battleground state.

Fitzgerald said it just doesn’t make sense to have that kind of delay in knowing who won Pennsylvania.

The process of mail-in ballots doesn’t include actually counting them. That can’t begin until the polls close at 8 p.m. on Election Day.

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