County must alert voters whose ballots are found to have one or more mistakes.
A Pennsylvania county illegally failed to inform voters that their ballots were rejected and would not be counted in last April’s primary election, a judge has ruled.
The judge said the Washington County Board of Elections must alert voters whose votes are rejected, enabling them to cast provisional ballots.
“This ruling marks a significant step in safeguarding the voting rights of Washington County residents,” Sarah Martik, executive director of the Center for Coalfield Justice, said in a statement. “It should be a no-brainer that voters are notified if they make a mistake on their mail-in ballot packet and have the option to cast a provisional ballot.”
Washington County officials adopted a policy of not notifying voters whose mail-in ballots or voter packets were found to have one or more errors that their votes would not be counted. That led to 259 ballots, or 2 percent of the votes, from the April primary being rejected and the voters who cast the ballots not finding out until after the election.
That failure to notify the voters “deprived qualified electors the ability to challenge the decision made by the canvass board to