Philly elections officials adopted a last-minute change that will slow down the counting of votes

Counting Philadelphia’s votes will take longer than expected this election.

City officials voted Tuesday morning — as polling places opened and the vote count began for the midterm elections — to reinstate a time-consuming and labor-intensive process for catching double votes that will slow how quickly they can report results.

If Pennsylvania’s high-stakes U.S. Senate race is as close as expected, a wait for results out of the state’s largest city is sure to shine a national spotlight on Philadelphia, similar to after the 2020 presidential election.

The city commissioners, the three-member elections board, voted 2-1 to reinstate what is known as poll book reconciliation — a means of flagging mail ballots submitted by voters who also voted in person — during an emergency 7 a.m. meeting.

It was a sudden reversal of a decision they made less than a week ago and came a day after a city judge, responding to a Republican lawsuit, said they could move forward without the process.

“I want to be very clear that when there are conversations that occur later this evening about whether or not Philadelphia has counted all of their ballots that the reason that some ballots would not be counted is that Republicans targeted Philadelphia — and only Philadelphia — to force us to conduct a procedure that no other county does,” Seth Bluestein, the sole Republican commissioner, said before voting for reconciliation.

» READ MORE: Your voter’s guide to the Nov. 2022 election in Pennsylvania

He was joined by Lisa Deeley, the Democrat who chairs the board. Fellow Democrat Omar Sabir voted against reinstating the poll book reconciliation process.

Originally, city elections officials had expected to have nearly all votes counted by Wednesday morning. The vote to reinstate poll book reconciliations means that ballots still left to count after Tuesday night — numbering in the low tens of thousands — will instead be counted and reported in a slow trickle over the rest of the week.

The commissioners voted last week to remove the reconciliation process this election, saying it was no longer necessary. While reconciliation caught a few dozen double votes in 2020, there were none caught in the last three elections. City officials also said their reconciliation process, which pauses the vote count, appeared to conflict with rules Republican lawmakers placed on new state funding. Those rules require counties to count mail ballots around the clock until finished.

A group of Republicans quickly sued to force the city to keep reconciliation in place. And on Monday, a city judge lambasted the commissioners for that decision, saying they were inviting fraud and, in doing so, undermining faith in the election results. But, added Common Pleas Court Judge Anne Marie Coyle, forcing them to reinstate the process just hours before Tuesday’s election would be too disruptive.

Republicans immediately appealed that decision, trying again to force the city’s hand. But they acknowledged in a brief hearing in Commonwealth Court that Tuesday’s vote by the commissioners had made their request for an injunction moot.

Bluestein said that while city elections officials had won their case on paper, they had been backed into a corner.

“While we technically won the court case in Common Pleas Court,” he said, “the opinion that was written was written in a way that we have no other choice but to go forward and reinstate reconciliation.”

All counties perform poll book reconciliation, the process of scanning poll book pages to update information in the state’s voter registry. By crediting voters who cast ballots in person at polling places, elections officials can confirm voter activity; make sure the number of voters, ballots cast, and votes counted line up in each precinct; and perform other data verification and cleanup work.

Philly had previously gone beyond what other counties did. In 2020, with the dramatic expansion of mail voting in Pennsylvania, officials made poll book reconciliation part of the process for counting mail ballots. That’s because some voters who request and return their mail ballots close to Election Day won’t be marked in the poll books as using mail ballots. Those voters, if they submit mail ballots and also show up in person, might slip through the cracks and be allowed to vote using both methods.

Philly addressed that by pausing the vote count to scan poll books before accepting the ballots of those late-in-cycle voters. That allowed officials to flag and remove any double votes.

But even after the vote count begins again, it’s significantly slower. Mail ballots from a precinct can only be counted once that precinct’s poll books have been scanned. The time-consuming work of scanning poll books becomes a bottleneck that slows the vote count to a crawl.

Voting last Wednesday to eliminate poll book reconciliation, the commissioners said they would do what Pennsylvania’s other counties do: carry out the process after the count, to speed things up.

They maintained that the process is no longer necessary and that state law doesn’t require them to do it during the vote count.

And in fact, they said, the initial pause in the vote count required by the reconciliation process would put millions of dollars in new state funding at risk.

The GOP-controlled state legislature this summer created new funding for elections — and it comes with the requirement that counties count votes “without interruption” until they’re done. Philly accepted its $5.4 million share of that grant money, which means the city is now subject to that continuous vote count requirement.