Counting Philadelphia’s votes will take longer than expected this election.
City officials voted Tuesday morning — as polling places opened and the vote count began for the midterm elections — to reinstate a time consuming and labor-intensive process for catching double votes that will slow how quickly they can report results.
If Pennsylvania’s high-stakes U.S. Senate race is as close as expected, a wait for results out of the state’s largest city is sure to shine a national spotlight on Philadelphia, similar to after the 2020 presidential election.
The city commissioners, the three-member elections board, voted 2-1 to reinstate what is known as poll book reconciliation — a means of flagging mail ballots submitted by voters who also voted in person — during an emergency 7 a.m. meeting.
It was a sudden reversal of a decision they made less than a week ago and came a day after a city judge, responding to a Republican lawsuit, said they could move forward without the process.
“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,” Seth Bluestein, the sole Republican commissioner, said before voting for reconciliation.