Allegheny County tallies nearly 15,000 more votes, count continues Thursday

Allegheny County counted another 14,969 ballots Wednesday, bringing the total number of ballots cast in the county to nearly 718,000, officials said.

The Return Board counted the last 7,000 ballots that remained to be processed from the batch of 29,000 that had to be set aside because of a printing error.

In October, 29,000 Allegheny County voters received a misprinted ballot due to an error on the part of Midwest Direct, the Ohio company contracted to print and mail the county’s ballots. The company sent out corrected ballots; county elections officials agreed to segregate those ballots as they came in to settle concerns raised by local Republican candidates.

Those ballots, once cast, were separated into three categories: voters who returned only the corrected ballots, voters who returned both the wrong and corrected ballots, and those who only returned the incorrect ballots.

Return Board members checked the incorrect ballots against those that were surrendered at the polls on Election Day to make sure no one surrendered their corrected ballot and voted in person.

Any remaining incorrect ballots had to be processed by hand to count only the votes applicable to where the voter lives.

That means votes cast in the presidential and statewide races will likely be counted, whereas local and legislative races could be affected.

Biden’s lead grows

As that process is done, the ballots were scanned and tallied. Of the 7,000 counted, 5,093 were for Joe Biden and 1,607 were for Donald Trump, with the remainder going to other candidates, according to county spokeswoman Amie Downs.

Once they finished counting those ballots, county officials turned their attention to 17,000 provisional ballots.

Provisional ballots are given to voters if there is some question of their eligibility, for example if their name does not appear on the district register due to a clerical error.

The votes can be counted once the voter’s eligibility has been determined.

Officials opened, scanned and tabulated 8,097 unchallenged and complete provisional ballots Wednesday night. That count came to 4,345 votes for Biden and 3,579 for Trump.

They called off the count at 9 p.m., with plans to resume at 9 a.m. Thursday.

The remaining provisional ballots will be reviewed and, if eligible, tabulated. The remaining overseas and military ballots will also be counted, according to Downs.

Observers from both parties are watching over the process at the warehouse: 14 are representing Republican candidates and seven are representing Democrats. Downs said there is also a staffer from the Committee on House Administration.