Lancaster County commissioners are set to approve a $1.8 million state election integrity grant Wednesday that could help pay for mail-in ballot design changes meant to reduce the number of rejected ballots in the Nov. 5 general election.
The design tweak comes from a directive issued July 1 by Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt intended to prevent clerical errors that disqualify ballots.
When voters sign and date the mail-in ballot’s outer envelope this fall, they will need to fill out only the month and day of their signature. The state directive requires counties to print envelopes with the four-digit year already filled out.
In previous years, a small percentage of voters saw their ballots rejected because they wrote their date of birth on the voter declaration, rather than the date they signed the ballot envelope.
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To reduce the chance of voters making that mistake, state officials last year introduced a revamped ballot design for counties ahead of elections in 2024. The primary ballot had the “20” of 2024 already filled in for the signature year, so voters would be less likely to think they needed to write their date of birth.
The change successfully reduced the share of voters who had their ballots rejected for missing a date in their declaration, according to analysis by the nonpartisan news outlet Votebeat. For instance, last year 0.56% of mail-in voters failed to fill in a date on their declaration. In the April 23 primary, that percentage fell to 0.17%.
But some voters still neglected to fill in the last two digits of the year, disqualifying their ballots in Lancaster County, which was among at least 22 counties that ignored guidance from the Department of State to count ballots with the last two digits left blank.
Whether voters need to date their signature declaration at all remains fodder for litigation in Pennsylvania. The ACLU of Pennsylvania and other civil rights groups have challenged the law requiring voters to date their ballots, most recently in Commonwealth Court.
The $1.8 million election integrity grant Lancaster County is set to receive this year from the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development is the same as the 2023 grant, elections director Christa Miller said Tuesday at a commissioners work session.
It’s the third year the county has received the grant. The legislation that created the grant passed in 2022. The elections department has spent every penny of the grant dollars awarded to the county since 2022, Miller said.
In the first two years of the grant program, the county has used the election integrity money for basic operations like printing ballots and paying election workers. Since 2022, the county has also used the grant to buy new equipment like additional ballot extractors and sorters to speed up the processing of mail-in ballots and a metal fence around the perimeter of the Lancaster County Government Center to bolster security there.
