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House of Representatives
Session of 2023 - 2024 Regular Session

MEMORANDUM

Posted:	January 3, 2024 11:06 AM
From:	Representative Ann Flood and Rep. Zachary Mako, Rep. Joe Emrick
To:	All House members
Subject:	Elections Package

All Pennsylvanians deserve to have confidence in a reliable, well-run elections system. Unfortunately, Northampton County has experienced repeated Election Day mistakes due to administrative error and mismanagement, most recently resulting in many residents being unable to vote in the 2023 Municipal Election. Even worse, some of the mistakes were a repeat of largely the same issues the county had experienced in the past- and should have learned from to know better.   In response, we will soon be introducing a package of bills to address this consistent mismanagement of elections by Northampton County. These bills will provide improvements to administrative and machine reliability for Pennsylvanians across the state, particularly those in counties using the same type of machines as Northampton. Please join us in sponsoring these important improvements to the election system for all Pennsylvanians, and particularly for those in counties experiencing continued mis-administration of elections.

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Document #1

Description:

Prohibiting counties from newly purchasing, and the Department of State from newly certifying, any machine that uses a “ballot marking” method of operation.  The majority of counties instead use a “ballot scanning” method in the machines they have purchased, but for those counties like Northampton that instead selected “ballot marking” machines, this bill would require that as machines are replaced counties transition to the more reliable and secure “ballot scanning” method of operation.

Document #2

Description:	Requiring that for any county using a “ballot marking” machine, sufficient emergency ballots be supplied to each polling place for use if the machine is inoperable. This would ensure that, until the inferior machines are eventually replaced, no voter would have to be turned away from a polling place if the machine is inoperable.

Document #3

Description:

Requiring that any time a polling place is using emergency paper ballots rather than the planned machine voting, sufficiently private areas are prepared for voters to complete these ballots.  In the chaos of unexpected emergency voting operations, it remains vital that voters’ ballot secrecy be preserved. This did not consistently occur in Northampton County in the most recent election, and this bill would ensure that this requirement is specifically addressed in the Election Code.

Document #4

Description:	Amending the Election Integrity Grant Program to ensure that those funds may be used by counties to remediate administrative errors and problems that have arisen in recent elections, and to require remedial plans to be established by those counties in order to continue to participate in the grant program.