When will election results be known for Westmoreland, Allegheny, Pennsylvania? - TribLIVE

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Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf recalled when he won office in 2014 and reelection four years later, media reports unofficially declared him the victor within minutes after polls closed at 8 p.m.

“Ain’t happening this time,” Wolf said, acknowledging that Pennsylvania’s vote count is expected to take not minutes or hours but most likely days to complete in 2020. “Counties are going to have an enormous task on Election Day of starting to process, verify and count 3 million mail-in ballots all on Election Day.”

With record numbers of registered voters and the first general election held with “no excuse” mail-in balloting, state and local officials are bracing for what could be a lengthy process to count votes.

Counties cannot begin counting mail-in ballots until polls open at 7 a.m. Tuesday.

State election officials said most counties will begin the counts at that time, but a handful — seven, at last count — have indicated they will not start tallying mail-in ballots until Wednesday.

Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar, however, urged counties to begin counting as soon as possible.

“The outcome of Tuesday’s election could well depend on Pennsylvania. It is vitally important that the more than 3 million ballots cast by mail here be counted as soon as possible,” Boockvar said. “The country will be looking to Pennsylvania for accurate and timely results.”

“Vote

In Allegheny and Westmoreland counties, teams of workers will start counting mail-in ballots at 7 a.m. Elections staff will remove ballots from the outer mailing and secrecy envelopes, smooth out the paper and run them through digital scanners to tally the votes.

Westmoreland officials said mail-in ballot counting will continue throughout the day, past the closing of the polls and up until midnight, when a decision will be made whether to keep going or halt the effort until the next morning.

“We’re hoping to have a significant amount of votes counted by then, but that will rely on the ballots. If things are going well, we will keep going. It’s a decision we will make on the fly,” said Commissioner Sean Kertes, who serves as chairman of the county elections board.

Westmoreland issued more than 75,000 mail-in ballots. By Friday, about 70% — more than 52,000 — had been returned. The number expected by Election Day is nearly twice the amount of mail-in ballots the county received in the June primary, when it took elections staffers nearly three days to count 40,000 mail-in ballots.

The county since has purchased two additional scanners that officials said will speed up the counting process.

Two shifts of 40 workers will open and process ballots in what Elections Bureau Director JoAnn Sebastiani said will function as four assembly lines.

Kertes said Westmoreland will issue its first report detailing vote totals about 9:30 p.m. to include all mail-in ballots counted through 8 p.m. as well as the first returns from the county’s 307 precincts. Results for the precincts will be updated periodically through the night, but additional votes cast by mail won’t be reported on the county website until midnight.

Allegheny County mailed out more than 413,000 ballots to voters. As of Friday, county officials said 315,000 had been returned.

The county scheduled 250 people to start work at 6:30 a.m. Tuesday and 150 people to work the 3 to 11 p.m. and 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. shifts to count ballots. Chet Harhut, deputy manager of the Allegheny County Elections Division, said 10 scanners will be used to count about 300 ballots per minute.

“I think we just want to be fair and accurate, but quick,” Harhut said.

Chris Deluzio, policy director for the University of Pittsburgh Institute for Cyber Law, Policy and Security, said counties have until Nov. 10 to post unofficial returns and until Nov. 23 to certify the results.

“Pennsylvania is in the minority of states in that counties here cannot precanvass or process ballots until the morning of the election. That makes us an outlier,” Deluzio said. “There are 34 states that allow for preprocessing of ballots. The clear trend is that states with robust experience in mail voting and have been smart about election administration are allowing preprocessing and are able to get their ballots processed more quickly.”

Other key swing states such as Florida and Arizona have started counting early votes. As a result, Pennsylvania’s potential reporting lag might not prove a hurdle in calling the outcome of the presidential race.

But should Pennsylvania be among the final piece of the puzzle in determining who wins the White House, it could be well into the following week before all the votes are counted. As things stand, mail-in ballots postmarked before 8 p.m. Nov. 3 can be counted if they arrive at county election offices by 5 p.m. Friday.

State officials, however, advised county elections officials to store those ballots separately in the event of another legal challenge attempting to bar them from being counted.

Many counties, including Allegheny and Westmoreland, also will wait to count provisional ballots cast at polls on Election Day. Both counties said the counting of those ballots will begin Friday.

“I think almost certainly it would be well to have full unofficial results on election night, but I don’t think it means anything nefarious has happened if that is not the case,” Deluzio said.

Rich Cholodofsky is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact Rich at 724-830-6293, rcholodofsky@triblive.com or via Twitter .