Northumberland County saw over 11,000 mail-in ballot requests a week before election
SUNBURY – Northumberland County saw an unprecedented number of requests for mail-in ballots for the 2020 election and they have beefed up their elections staffing and processes because of it.
Northumberland County chairman and chairman of the county Board of Elections, Sam Schiccatano, says a lot of work goes on behind the scenes to process the mail-ins, “There’s a lot of double checking. You know, people think they just come in with this mail-in ballot, hand it in, and that’s it. It’s not it, there’s a lot more work after that.”
Schiccatano says they’ve had to increase staffing, as well as make some other changes along the way to ensure voter and ballot safety and convenience, “It’s been a big impact on the county as far as hiring people to help out with this election.”
“The other thing people don’t realize is that Pennsylvania came out last year and made all the counties buy certified, new voting machines which is also something new for each election office. We have the company that actually sold us the machines also on board on the day of the election and they also did some training for us,” he said.
He says the new machines have been in place since the primary, “So we went with a machine that you still did it electronically, but when you were finished that paper-like ballot would come out. You’d be able to check it and then there’s a slot that you put it in. So the big thing was they wanted a paper backup.”
Schiccatano says their machines only tallied votes in the past and now they are required to keep the paper back-ups for a certain period of time. A week before the election, Schiccatano said they had about 11,000 requests for mail-in ballots and more than half of those had already been returned.
Northumberland County Commissioner Sam Schiccatano was a recent guest on WKOK’s Sunrise program. You can hear the full interview on the WKOK podcast page.
