Westmoreland County voters will begin receiving mail-in ballots as early as this weekend, possibly early next week.
State officials signed off on the May 18 primary ballots and, on Wednesday, it is expected information will be forwarded to the county’s new private mail company to print and send out ballots to voters, said JoAnn Sebastiani, director of the county Elections Bureau.
“We’ll start to mail them out by this weekend,” she said.
Ballots include primaries for state judge as well as county row offices, municipal councils, supervisor positions and school board seats. Four referendums, including three seeking to amend the state constitution, also will appear on ballots. Voters in 42 precincts also can participate in a special election to fill a state House vacancy caused by the death in January of state Rep. Mike Reese, R-Mt. Pleasant.
So far, the county approved more than 14,000 applications for no excuse mail-in and absentee ballots. The deadline to apply for a mail-in ballot for this spring’s primary is May 11.
The county mailed about 40,000 ballots to voters last spring and another 80,000 in the fall. Printing and mailing delays last October at the private Ohio-based company that county commissioners hired to perform that task for last year’s general election prompted local leaders to hire new company, NPC Inc. of Blair County, to do the same work this spring.
Mail-in ballots must be returned to the county before polls close at 8 p.m. May 18.
Sebastiani said ballots will be sent out with prepaid postage attached to return envelopes.
Commissioners are scheduled to meet April 27 as the local elections board. Commissioner Sean Kertes said Tuesday the board will decide then whether to place drop boxes throughout the county and finalize where and when they will be located, if authorized. The county placed drop boxes at five locations over two weekends before last fall’s election.
Commissioners indicated last week that drop boxes likely will be used again this spring.
