- Philadelphia's election board voted Tuesday to reinstate a rule that will delay a final vote tally.
- Now the city will check for double votes during the election-night counting process, not afterwards.
Philadelphia's last-minute decision to reinstate a policy requiring poll workers to check for double votes during — not after — the election-night tallying of ballots will further delay final results, a fact that a local Republican election official blames squarely on the GOP.
"I want to be very clear that when there are conversations that occur later this evening about whether or not Philadelphia has counted all of their ballots that the reason that some ballots would not be counted is that Republicans targeted Philadelphia — and only Philadelphia — to force us to conduct a procedure that no other county does," City Commissioner Seth Bluestein said Tuesday morning, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported.
Bluestein is the sole Republican on Philadelphia's elections commission. At issue is a rule, known as poll book reconciliation, that aims to ensure no voter casts more than one ballot, such as by voting in person after voting by mail.
Last week, city elections officials voted to carry out that process after the initial vote tally, as every other county in Pennsylvania does, in an effort to speed up election results — and citing the fact that no double votes had been found in recent elections. State law also requires election officials to continuously count ballots, a fact the commissioners argued was at odds with its reconciliation process.
But Republicans sued to have the rule reinstated. And while they lost that case on Monday, the judge, herself an elected Republican, provided sufficient fodder in her ruling for an appeal, which was immediately filed with a higher court.
While "we technically won," Bluestein explained, "the opinion that was written was written in a way that we have no other choice but to go forward and reinstate reconciliation."
In 2020, state and national Republicans baselessly alleged that Philadelphia — Pennsylvania's most populous county and heavily Democratic — was the source of mass voter fraud, citing delays in its elections results.
But, in addition to the delay imposed by GOP litigation, Philadelphia is prohibited from counting mail-in ballots prior to election day, a fact the state's Republican-controlled legislature has not changed, despite pleas from local officials.
As of last week, Philadelphia election officials had reported receiving over 100,000 mail-in ballots out of more than 165,000 that had been sent to area voters, WHYY reported.
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