HARRISBURG, Pa. - Printing mistakes will force local election officials in Pennsylvania and Oregon to redo thousands of mailed ballots, a laborious process that could delay results for some closely contested races in Tuesday's primaries.In Pennsylvania, where GOP primaries for governor and U.S.
Senate are drawing national attention, officials in Republican-leaning Lancaster County said the company that printed its mailed ballots included the wrong ID code, preventing scanning machines from being able to read them.
The problem involved at least 21,000 mailed ballots, only a third of which were scanning properly.The glitch will force election workers to hand-mark fresh ballots, a process expected to take several days.
Officials in the county, the state's sixth-most populous, pledged that all the ballots will be counted eventually."Citizens deserve to have accurate results from elections and they deserve to have them on election night, not days later," Josh Parsons, a Republican and vice chair of the county board of commissioners, said at a news conference. "But because of this, we’re not going to have final election results from these mail ballots for probably several days, so that is very, very frustrating to us."In Oregon, where all registered voters receive a mailed ballot, officials in one politically pivotal county are dealing with a similar problem.