Lancaster County still counting thousands of ballots due to printing error
"It won't read the barcode because it's looking for the right election code to read the ballot," said county officials.
PHILADELPHIA (WPVI) -- Dozens of election workers and volunteers were hard at work Wednesday trying to fix a problem that rendered approximately two-thirds of mail-in ballots in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania unreadable by the ballot scanner machines.
"It won't read the barcode because it's looking for the right election code to read the ballot," said Ray D'Agostino, the chairman of Lancaster County Board of Elections.
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He says the mail ballot vendor, a company called NPC, has admitted to printing the wrong identification code on those ballots.
And the only realistic and timely way to fix the problem is for these workers to rewrite, by hand, roughly 16,000 ballots that don't work, onto ballots that do work.
Among the people overseeing the process is Kirk Radanovich, chairman of the Lancaster Republican Committee.
"It's frustrating to have to go through it, but I am much more concerned in getting it right than getting it first. If it takes us all day today, if it takes us into tomorrow, as long as I'm sure that the vote is accurate, that's what I'm concerned about," said Radanovich.
There are also Democratic Party officials serving as ballot watchers and attorneys from both the Oz and McCormick campaigns.
Each ballot is being worked on by teams of three poll workers, adding an extra sets of eyes on each vote.
Radanovic says he knows full well that the results that come from this effort could very well swing the GOP primary results one way or the other.
"The last I looked we were at about 1,500 separating Oz and McCormick. And the last estimate that I had is we have 5,500 Republican ballots still in that room to be remarked and then counted," said Radanovich.
