PA mandated new machines be put in place to create a paper trail for fraud purposes. Those machines were installed several election cycles ago in my county. Some counties, however, may have waited until this year to put these new machines in so add more time because people won't be familiar with them during a heave vote Presidential election.
They are neat little machines. You punch in your vote, it prints out your ballot, you look at it to verify your vote then you take it to a machine that scans it in and shows you your vote then you verify its correct and you're done. Well, my first thought after I voted was this is going to cause chaos in places like Philly and Pittsburgh where you have lots and lots of voters to process. It takes much more time to vote than the machines we had. There's also more opportunities for malfunctions to snarl the whole process. All I could think of is long lines in high population areas, which tend to be Democratic, and people getting fed up waiting in line and just not voting. You won't have that problem in rural (Republican leaning) areas of the state because they don't have to process half a million voters like Philly and it's surrounding counties and Allegheny County. This still could happen when this pandemic is over and more people vote in person.
Also remember there are like a half a dozen counties in PA with voter rolls over half a million people that had hundreds of thousands of mail in votes to process. That means verifying signatures, opening envelopes, checking for the ballot envelop (naked ballots), unfolding the ballot, putting it through a machine and handling any machine malfunctions. Hats off to the folks who pulled off this monumental task.
Wolfe and many counties pleaded with the Republican legislature to allow them to start preparing the ballots before Tuesday. The Legislature wouldn't budge so none of the mail ins were processed until 7 am on Tuesday. Not a problem for most of the rural counties that have a couple thousand mail in votes to process versus Philly, which had over 350k to go through.
And which is more egregious in your mind, that Philly is still counting its votes 2 days after the polls closed or Juniata County not processing its mail in votes two days after it closed its polls? For comparison, total votes in Philly were +700k versus Juniata that had less than 10k in person votes on Tuesday.
Peace
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