What’s going on with Allegheny County?

A tweet from a New York Times reporter went viral that noted that Allegheny County, in western Pennsylvania, was not counting 35,000 remaining mail-in ballots Thursday, and was waiting until Friday to process them.

https://twitter.com/tripgabriel/status/1324374362561126401?s=20

While correct, the tweet is also out of context. Most of those ballots — 29,000 of them — were resent to voters late because a vendor error meant their ballots had the wrong races on them.

Chris Potter, of the local NPR affiliate, WESA-FM, explained the error here:

Here I am going to try to address some confusion about why Allegheny County is not going to begin counting 30,000+ ballots until tomorrow. People are going bonkers about this, or castigating hard-working employees on no sleep, and it is wrong. (thread)

— Chris Potter (@CPotterPgh) November 5, 2020

So you have to give those ballots special scrutiny to make sure that a) people don't vote twice, and b) if they just send in the old one, they don't vote in races they aren't eligible for. So you can't just scan them with the rest.

— Chris Potter (@CPotterPgh) November 5, 2020

When ballots require special scrutiny, the county records the vote through a return board whose members are sworn in for that purpose. The board reviews the results tallied up by election workers after polls close, but also addresses provisional ballots, military ballots, etc.

— Chris Potter (@CPotterPgh) November 5, 2020

There is nothing nefarious here: Be advised, Trump supporters, that county's GOP chair is comfortable with process. Nor is this a case of shiftless public workers taking a day off. This is longstanding process, and the county made clear how 29k would be handled well before E-day

— Chris Potter (@CPotterPgh) November 5, 2020