Westmoreland commissioners select in-state company to handle mail-in ballots triblive.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from triblive.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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It’s hard to believe Westmoreland County will probably pay Midwest Direct for ballots that never appeared in voters’ mailboxes and may give them another chance.
They weren’t delayed they never arrived! Either Midwest Direct said they mailed them without doing so, or they disappeared from U.S. Postal Service custody. Is there any actual proof they were mailed? If they were, it’s a federal crime.
I got a postcard reminding me to return my mail-in ballot, which had not arrived, the week before the election. I called the courthouse, both the Elections Bureau and the county commissioners’ office, and reported I’d not received it, and was assured it had been mailed on Oct. 14.
Rich Cholodofsky | Tribune-Review
Gerry Fjellanger (left) and Michele DeFloria file more than 30,000 mail-in ballots returned in Westmoreland County during last year’s primary.
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Westmoreland County has received proposals from seven companies to print and mail ballots for the spring primary, including one from the Cleveland-based firm that has yet to be paid as a result of production delays last fall that impacted thousands of local voters.
Elections Bureau director JoAnn Sebastiani said Midwest Direct Presort Mail, along with one printing business in Pennsylvania and companies from Michigan, Ohio, Georgia and Washington state, submitted pitches to print and mail ballots for the May 18 primary. That election will feature hundreds of local races, including county row offices, district judges, municipal councils, township supervisors and school boards.
Westmoreland County officials said
this week no decisions have been reached about how it will handle bills recently received from an Ohio direct mailing company that claimed mechanical issues caused two delays in sending ballots out to voters this fall.
The county received two invoices earlier this month totaling more than $149,000 from Midwest Direct Presort Mailing for the printing and mailing of ballots. The Cleveland-based company was hired in September by the county commissioners to work with the elections bureau this fall.
The county has yet to pay those bills. One charged the county to print about 10,000 ballots that were distributed in person to voters at the courthouse. Another bill for $142,000 was for printing and mailing ballots directly to more than 76,000 voters ahead of the Nov. 3 general election.