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On Monday, Pennsylvania’s Luzerne County Board of Elections voted not to certify the results of the 2022 midterm elections.
On Election Day, the county extended poll hours to 10 p.m. for in-person voting due to a shortage of paper ballots, according to Just the News.
Luzerne is the same county that came under fire during the 2020 election after discovering discarded Trump ballots, which county officials blamed on a “temporary seasonal independent contractor.”
The county deadlocked in a vote to certify the 2022 election results, voting 2-2 along party lines, with two Democrats voting to certify and two Republicans voting against. A third Democrat board member, Daniel Schramm, voted to abstain.
Schramm said, “My feeling is I needed a little more information. So, I really didn’t want to say, oh, yeah, we’re done with it now. I want more information, so I can make a short decision on that it’s right to certify it or not to certify it.”
However, Schramm later told the Associated Press that he would cast his vote in favor of voting to certify the election results at a Wednesday board meeting. The AP reported, “Schramm said in a phone interview several hours later that after the meeting he received assurances that few if any voters were unable to cast ballots and that all provisional ballots had been counted. He said he planned to vote in favor of certifying the results at a board meeting set for Wednesday.”
Schramm said, “I wanted to research to see exactly how many people were just not allowed to vote. I couldn’t find any.”
Republican board member James Magna said that he voted not to certify the results because “There have been enough irregularities and enough discrepancies and enough disenfranchisement of disenfranchised voters in this county that I don’t understand how we could possibly proceed without seriously considering a re-vote.”
WNEP 16 News in Pennsylvania reported that during a public hearing before the Board of Elections, “More than a dozen voters and volunteers urged against certifying the election for several reasons, including the shortage of ballot paper, the inability for people to vote, misspellings on ballots, voters being turned away, and a lack of privacy for voters.”
