Carter Walker

Beleaguered Pennsylvania county makes another election mistake It’s the second error in three months by Chester County, whose election director faces calls to resign.

New from us: The day after Chester County faced criticism for a poll book printing error, county officials learned mail ballot applications had also been misprinted. Accuracy checks did not catch the error, but the applications remain valid. www.votebeat.org/pennsylvania...

Pennsylvania election director in the hot seat after pollbook error Investigators said Karen Barsoum’s leadership wasn’t to blame for the error in Chester County, but some residents are calling for her resignation anyway.

My latest from Chester County: Tempers flare as investigators detail causes of the pollbook error

Middle fingers, praise for DNI Tulsi Gabbard, and a new statement from the county elections director responding to criticism of her management style.

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for the management issues he said he and other experienced, and which went unaddressed by the county. He asked the commissioners to fire the county election director, and then stared her down as he walked away from the mic to applause from the audience.

We're well into the public comment section of the evening, and I won't recap all comments which are, as you'd imagine, mostly from folks who are upset. But the last commentor was a former voter services employee who said he planned to work for the office his entire career if not

The total cost to the county for this error is unknown, the Fleck attorney says.

The county will also develop contingency plans for deploying provisional ballots, create its own training program, look at its employee pay (to stop losing employees to other counties), and develop standardized onboarding procedures for voter service employees.

Duel-signature verification and spot checks for poll books will be implemented for poll book generation. Sign-offs will also be required for other critical tasks.

County said it will work with DOS on changes to SURE and training on its use. They will also improve the county website to make it more user-friendly, as many had trouble on Election Day getting updated information.

The report primarily recommends changes to the SURE system and associated training, implementing supervision for critical tasks, and adding spot-checks to catch errors. County is now speaking about how they will implement the report's recommendations.

In addition, the employees tasked with creating the poll books were unsupervised. Both were relatively new. There are some chuckles from the crowd at learned how new the employees were (just a few months).

The Fleck Eckert Klein said the employee extracting the poll books "had not had the benefit of any formal training in their job." They only had informal "on the job" training.

"This appears to be a human error in clicking a wrong box"

Lawfirm confirms Chester County employee did check this box.

unless you check that box. It seems this checked box in the training guide could have been what led to the error.

voters from major parties” box is checked. There is writing on the side that indicates that will extract only Democrat and Republicans and should not be used in presidential (read November) elections. DOS said the poll book tool in SURE defaults to selecting all voters, evidently

Here is something interesting, sorry about the angle. Stick with me for this explanation. The lawfirm which investigated the error says this is a screen from the Dept. of State training guide for election workers. They point out that this page from that document shows the “only

Reports of the poll book error started to come in from election workers around 6:30 AM, when they first unsealed their election day materials and realized the pollbooks were incomplete.

There appear to be about 100 people in attendance. An attorney with Fleck Eckert Klein, the lawfirm which conducted the investigation into the error, is giving an overview of their findings.

Here’s what was behind the error that affected 12,600 voters in Pennsylvania’s 2025 election Human error led to thousands of voters being left out of the pollbooks in a major Pennsylvania county, according to a new report that recommends procedural changes.

Background here:

www.votebeat.org/pennsylvania...

I’m here in Chester County where a meeting on the 2025 poll book printing error is getting underway. Follow for updates.

a county meeting where the investigation into the 2025 poll book printing error will be discussed. Will be posting updates on both here!

Hello Bluesky! This is Carter Walker from Votebeat! Finally opened an account here so that we can share all we're working on with you. I'll be watching Governor Shapiro's budget address today for any election policy references, though I don't expect much. Later tonight, I'll be in Chester County for