A top elections official said Monday that “human error” in tracking the results of the May 17 primary election led Pennsylvania to inadvertently certify a county’s vote counts that the state deems to be inaccurate.where the state is seeking to break a standoff with three counties
Marks apologized to the court for what he described as an oversight resulting from “a manual process” — a spreadsheet — the department had used to track which counties were counting undated ballots. Butler County was misclassified in the spreadsheet, he said, and from that point forward was left out of the state’s campaign to push counties that hadn’t included them.
And the department’s internal processes have failed before in a high-profile way. Former Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar, who oversaw the 2020 election,, as state law requires. The failure to perform a legally required administrative task raised questions about procedures inside the department, which has since said it had bolstered its systems and instituted additional levels of scrutiny.
If the department is willing to accept them, it complicates its argument in court that the three defiant counties must count undated ballots. After all, it would essentially be fighting for those three counties to count undated ballots while allowing a fourth county to exclude them.