随着宾夕法尼亚州6月2日的总统和全州初选选举任何选民都可以选择通过邮件投票，选举官员总是为越来越多的申请做好准备。
他们没想到的是冠状病毒流行病和17倍增加的选民想把他们的选票从投票区投出去。
现在，初选一周后，选票仍在统计中，导致当地选举官员拉响警报，警告美国可能不知道11月选举之夜这个战场州的结果。
“我们不想让世界站在我们的前面，等着我们告诉他们谁赢了。事情就这么简单，”费城郊区蒙哥马利县的首席运营官兼首席职员李·索奇萨克说。
索奇萨克周一告诉美国广播公司新闻，他希望在6月2日下午7点投票结束前完成所有收到的选票列表，但这还不包括在那之后收到的大约5800张仍需要统计的选票。
2020年6月3日，宾夕法尼亚州哈里斯堡，州长汤姆·沃尔夫举着一个“黑人生活很重要”的牌子，和示威者一起走在哈里斯堡市长埃里克·帕彭福斯的身边。
在正常选举中，选票必须在《泰晤士报》投票结束前收到，但由于各县除了冠状病毒之外还面临大规模抗议，民主党州长汤姆·沃尔夫(Tom Wolf)签署了一项最后一刻的行政命令，延长了六个县的投票截止时间，其中包括该州人口最多的两个县——费城和阿勒格尼——允许在6月9日星期二下午5点前送达的任何盖有6月2日邮戳的选票也被计算在内。
虽然邮寄选票比例较高的州花更长时间统计和报告选举结果并不罕见，但从历史上看，这些州并不是能够决定总统选举的州。
目前尚不清楚冠状病毒在秋季会有多大影响，但在像宾夕法尼亚州这样的州，唐纳德·特朗普总统对希拉里·克林顿的支持率仅为44，292票，随着选举官员处理这些选票，同样大量的邮件投票可能会让选举提前几天进行。
国务卿凯西·布克瓦说初选进行得“非常顺利”，并称邮寄选票是“巨大的成功”，但即使如此，她也说她“绝对”关心大选。
她在大选之夜的新闻发布会上表示:“这种激增是一回事，但我认为我们在11月份可以期待比这更多的事情。”。“即使现在没有COVID-19人，你知道，也要先知道这种情况的存在，并有这么大的参与量，我们很可能会再次看到这一点。”
“由于选举法的变化，人们需要意识到这是一个不同的世界，我们现在生活在其中，”尼克·库斯托迪奥说，他是费城丽莎·迪利专员手下的副专员。“获得所有结果需要比平时更长的时间。”
库斯托迪奥周一表示，该市正在“与选民名册进行核对”，以确保所有投票总数准确无误。他预计他们会在周二再次开始计数。他告诉美国广播公司新闻，市政官员已经在寻找方法来加快11月份的计票过程，但是很难确定情况会如何，以及是否需要增加邮件投票仍然是大选的最佳时机。
但是那些负责该州选举的人面临着障碍，除非立法机构在11月前采取行动，否则将会再次减缓他们取得结果的速度。
根据10月份签署成为法律的选举改革法案第77号法案，在投票结束前不能开始邮寄选票。通过邮件申请投票的截止日期是选举日的前一周，这使得邮件的周转更加紧密——即使是在正常的非冠状病毒情况下。现在，选票要集中统计，而不是邮寄到投票站进行小批量统计。
“我现在可以告诉你，如果共和党的拉票规则没有改变，任何人都不可能负责任地宣布11月份的总统竞选。根本不可能，”莱康明县选举主任福勒斯特·莱曼说，他在这次初选中处理了10倍多的邮件投票申请。
“法律需要与这里的后勤和现实相匹配，”索奇萨克在选举前告诉美国广播公司新闻。“这很明显。它是可以修复的，对吗?...这个问题的解决方案非常明确，真的很遗憾我们还在花时间讨论这个问题。”
投票权倡导者和选举工作人员都担心他们没有足够的资源来完成选举。
在费城，市政委员会主席丽莎·迪利在初选前的一次市议会会议上警告说，如果不增加预算，“我们将面临无法让11月选举站起来的危险。”
2020年6月2日，匹兹堡，居民们在威尔金斯堡市政大楼外排队投票。
北安普顿县是宾夕法尼亚州三个投票中心县之一，曾两次投票给奥巴马和时任总统唐纳德·特朗普(Donald Trump)，选举官员表示，额外的紧急人员配备和加班时间是他们实现邮寄投票扩张的唯一途径。
当被美国广播公司询问她是否觉得她的官员有足够的资金和人力来处理选举变化时，该县的首席登记官艾米·科兹说他们没有。
“我们做到了，因为我们很棒，我的员工也很棒，但是我们没有足够的资源。我们没有足够的人力，”她说。“我们刚刚被要求实施的是前所未有的，而且没有资金支持，也没有得到国家的支持。这是非常困难的，我们知道在秋季将会是两倍的困难。我们不确定这将如何发生。”
科兹告诉美国广播公司新闻，除了在选举前额外增加了八名员工来帮助处理选票，她已经去了县委员会，要求额外的空间来存放选票材料和另外两名全职员工。
“我们必须扩大我们的办公室，以容纳所有投票材料。所以，是的，如果我们想让11月顺利进行，我们有一份需求清单，”她说。
投票权组织和民主党人也有一份他们希望看到得到满足的需求清单，首先是呼吁官员实施进一步的改革，使投票箱更加方便。
“我们觉得官员们没有履行他们对民主的义务。宾夕法尼亚州的选民在投票和返回选举中面临不必要的障碍，宾夕法尼亚州官员处理了近200万份邮寄选票申请，这无疑是值得称赞的，”宾夕法尼亚州“所有投票都是地方性的”主任斯科特·塞博格(Scott Seeborg)上周在选举后接受记者采访时说。“与此同时，我们的官员有责任确保每个合格的选民都能够安全地投出有价值的选票。”
在电话中，支持者要求选票自动发送给该州的每一个登记选民，并在选票上支付邮资。他们还推动建立投票中心，任何选民无论住在哪里都可以去，而不仅仅是根据他们的地址分配给他们的一个投票区。
宾夕法尼亚共同事业的临时主管苏珊娜·阿尔梅达说，增加更安全的投票箱对于县和地方选举官员来说是一个简单而廉价的增加可及性的方法。
阿尔梅达表示:“我们正在考虑的许多改革都是系统性的，需要大量额外资金。”。“这是宾夕法尼亚州的一个文化转变，因为这是我们第一次用这些数字通过邮件投票选举。
“人们需要明白，做对了比做得快要好。我们不会在选举之夜看到那种结果，那时我们会看到200万张缺席选票。没关系，这不是恶作剧的证据，”阿尔梅达说。
Mail-in voting delays in primary cause Pennsylvania to sound alarm about November
With Pennsylvania's presidential and statewide primary June 2 its firstelectionin which any voter could choose to vote by mail, election officials were always prepared for an increase in applications to do so.
What they weren’t expecting was thecoronaviruspandemic and the 17-fold increase in voters wanting to cast their ballots away from the polling precincts.
Now, a week after the primary, votes are still being counted, leading local election officials to sound the alarm, warning America may not know the outcome in the battleground state on election night in November.
“We don't want the world on our front step, waiting for us to tell them who won. It's as simple as that,” said Lee Soltysiak, the chief operating officer and chief clerk for Montgomery County, a suburb of Philadelphia.
Soltysiak told ABC News Monday that he expected to be done tabulating all the ballots received by the time polls closed at 7 p.m. on June 2 but that didn’t include any of the approximately 5,800 additional ballots received after that point that still need to be counted.
Gov. Tom Wolf, holds a "black lives matter" sign walking alongside Harrisburg Mayor Eric Papenfuse, right, with demonstrators, June 3, 2020 in Harrisburg, Pa.
In a normal election, ballots must be received by the times polls close, but as counties faced mass protests in addition to coronavirus, Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf signed an eleventh-hour executive order extending that deadline in six counties, including the two most populous in the state -- Philadelphia and Allegheny -- allowing any ballots postmarked by June 2 that arrive before 5 p.m. Tuesday June 9 to be counted as well.
While it isn’t uncommon for states which have higher percentages of mail ballots to take longer to count and report their election results, historically, these states aren’t the states that could decide the presidential election.
It’s unclear how big of an issue coronavirus will be in the fall, but in a state like Pennsylvania, where President Donald Trump’s margin of victory over Hillary Clinton was just 44,292 votes, seeing the same massive influx in vote-by-mail ballots could leave the election uncalled for days, as election officials process those ballots.
Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar said the primary went “remarkably smoothly,” and called the mail-in ballots a “huge success,” but even so, she also said she was “absolutely” concerned about the general election.
"This surge is one thing, but I think we could expect a lot more than this in November," she said during a press conference on election night. "Even without COVID-19 people now, you know, have a head start on knowing this exists and to have this amount of volume, and participation and engagement is likely we'll likely see that again."
“Due to the change in the election law, people need to realize that this is a different world we're living in now,” said Nick Custodio, the deputy commissioner under Commissioner Lisa Deeley in the city of Philadelphia. “It's going to take longer than normal to get all the results.”
On Monday, Custodio said the city was doing “reconciliation with the poll book,” to make sure all the vote totals are accurate. He expected they’d begin counting again Tuesday. He told ABC News that city officials are already looking at ways to speed up the counting process for November, but it is hard to know for sure what the state of play will be and if the need for increased vote-by-mail will still be as great come time for the general election.
But those tasked with running elections in the state face hurdles that, unless the legislature takes action before November, will again slow them down in delivering results.
Under the election reform bill signed into law in October, Act 77, can’t begin opening mail-in ballots until after the polls close. The deadline to apply to vote by mail is just one week before Election Day, which makes for a tight turnaround in the mail -- even under normal, non-coronavirus circumstances. And instead of the mail in ballots going to precincts to be counted in small batches, they now must be counted centrally.
"I can tell you now if nothing changes with the canvassing rules in P-A, there is no way anybody can responsibly call the presidential race in November. No way at all," said Forrest Lehman, the director of elections for Lycoming County, which processed 10 times more applications to vote-by-mail this primary.
“The law needs to match up with the logistics and the reality here,” Soltysiak told ABC News ahead of the election. “It's obvious. And it's fixable, right?... the solution to it is so clear that it, it really is a shame we're all still spending time talking about it.”
Voting rights advocates and election staff alike worry that they won’t have the resources they need to pull off the election.
In Philadelphia, the chair of the city commissioners, Lisa Deeley, warned in a city council meeting ahead of the primary that without a budget increase, “We would be in danger of not being able to have the November Election stand up.”
Residents wait in line outside the Wilkinsburg Municipal Building to cast their vote during primary voting, in Pittsburgh, June 2, 2020.
In Northampton County, one of Pennsylvania’s three pivot counties which twice voted for Obama and then President Donald Trump, election officials said additional emergency staffing and hours of overtime were the only ways they were able to pull off the mail-in voting expansion.
When asked by ABC News if she felt her officials had enough funding and manpower to handle election changes, Amy Cozze, the county’s chief registrar, said they did not.
“We made it happen because we're awesome, and my staff is awesome but no we did not have enough resources. We did not have enough manpower,” she said. “What we were just asked to implement was unprecedented, and it was unfunded, and it was not backed up by the state. It was very difficult, and we know that it's going to be twice as difficult in the fall. We're not really sure how it's going to happen.”
Cozze told ABC News that in addition to the eight extra employees brought on to help process ballots on the front-end of the election, she already went to her county commission to ask for additional space to store ballot materials and two more full-time employees.
“We have to expand our office just to accommodate, literally to accommodate, all the balloting materials. So, yeah, we have a laundry list of needs if we're going to make November go smoothly,” she said.
Voting rights groups and Democrats also have a laundry list of needs that they’d like to see met, starting with calls to officials to implement further reforms to make the ballot box more accessible.
“We feel like officials are short of filling their obligations to democracy. Pennsylvania voters faced unnecessary hurdles to the ballot and returns election, and it's definitely laudable that Pennsylvania officials processed almost 2 million mail-in ballot applications,” Scott Seeborg, the Pennsylvania state director of All Voting is Local, said on a post-election call with reporters last week. “And at the same time, it's the responsibility of our officials to ensure that every eligible voter can safely cast the ballots that count.”
On the call, advocates pushed for ballots to automatically be sent to every registered voter in the state and for postage to be paid on ballot returns. They also pushed for vote centers, where any voter could go to regardless of where they live, and not just the one polling precinct assigned to them based on their address.
Suzanne Almeida, the interim director of Common Cause Pennsylvania, said adding more secure ballot drop boxes would be an easy and cheap way for counties and local election officials to increase accessibility.
“Many of these reforms that we're looking at are systemic and require and require significant additional funding,” Almeida said. “It's a culture shift in Pennsylvania, as this is the first election we've ever voted by mail by these numbers.
“Folks need to understand that it's better to get it right than to get it quick. That we're just not going to see the kind of results on election night, when we see 2 million absentee ballots. And that's okay, that it's not evidence of shenanigans,” Almeida said.
