After municipal primary ballot issues, Lancaster County ends relationship with mail ballot vendor lancasteronline.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from lancasteronline.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Lancaster County leaders say they are intent on replacing the vendor they hired last year to print and send thousands of mail-in ballots to voters a move prompted by several errors the printer made that wound up requiring a time-consuming hand count of 12,000 primary election ballots that began Friday and stretched into Monday.
County Commissioner Ray DâAgostino said the county will reopen the mail balloting contract for bid in the next few weeks, and the county is working with its solicitor on how it can hold the current vendor accountable for its errors.Â
But why was the county paying an out-of-state company to print thousands of ballots? And what background did that company have in the complex business of producing mail-in voting materials?
Teams of three will work through the weekend to hand count mail-in ballots following a printing error which rendered the ballots unable to be tallied by machine.
Commissioner Ray D Agostino, chair of the Lancaster County Board of Elections, said the plan is to have 16 teams â each with one ballot reader, one recording onto a new blank ballot and one observer â hand count the approximately 14,000 misprinted ballots.
The effort will begin Friday and continue into the weekend. Poll watchers are very welcome, we want them to be a part of this, he said. Integrity doesn t just happen when things go right. It has to happen when things don t go right.
An error by Lancaster County s mail-in ballot vendor means more than half of all mail-in ballots will have to be hand-counted, causing a significant delay in final results â likely into the weekend.Â
Michigan Elections Resources printed multi-sheet ballots in the wrong order, affecting approximately 14,000 ballots, Lancaster County Board of Elections officials said Tuesday. Those ballots cannot be fed through the countyâs ballot scanners. Â
Roughly 27,000 mail-in ballots were requested for the primary. As of Tuesday afternoon, nearly 18,000 had been returned. We ll be starting the hand count at the end of the week, weekend; we re fleshing that out at the moment,  said Christa Miller, chief clerk of the board of elections. She said she anticipates the hand county will take three to four days to complete, and final results will be available by early next week.Â
Printing error affects about 14,000 mail-in ballots, says Lancaster County elections board
Updated May 18, 2021;
A printing error is affecting the counting of an estimated 14,000 mail-in ballots in Lancaster County, county elections officials said.
While opening mailed-in ballots Tuesday during the pre-canvass process, workers noticed that the ballots containing multiple sheets needed in some cases to list all the candidates and the ballot questions had been printed in the wrong order by the ballot vendor, Michigan Election Resources.
A news release from the county Board of Elections said pages 1 and 3 were mistakenly printed on the front and back of the same sheet, as were pages 2 and 4. If read in sequence, the board said, the pages would read 1,3,2 and 4.