Whoops! Pennsylvania’s Lackawanna County election office mailed last year’s ballots to 545 Republican primary voters in Scranton for the May 20, 2025 election. Voters caught the mistake and the county has now sent the correct ballot to those voters, the county said in a statement. Voters with a faulty ballot should toss it in the trash, including the envelope, the county says.
The county has an explanation for how this oddity happened, although the county did not explain how the error was not caught before printing or mailing. The 2024 primary ballot had presidential and Senate candidates—no one saw that before printing?
It is another example of the troubles that plague mail-in voting, and the control county election offices lose when they outsource the work taxpayers used to pay county workers to do to a third-party vendor.
In Pennsylvania, primary voters must be a member of the Democrat or Republican party. Independents don’t vote. Party members get different ballots and choose which members of their party to promote to the General Election ballot.
That is why only Republican ballots were affected. Also, a court challenge in the Scranton Republican mayoral race went past the print deadline, so Scranton Republican ballots were printed separately from the rest of the county’s.
Election Systems and Software (ES&S), a Nebraska-based voting machine company that also prints ballots, apologized and took responsibility for the blunder, said Beth Hopkins, director of the Lackawanna Department of Elections and Voter Registration, in a statement.
“During the printing process, an employee mistakenly pulled and printed a file from the 2024 election instead of the current 2025 election,” Kristy Ericson, ES&S director of ballot management services, said in an email, according to the county. “This human error in processing the files was missed in the quality check process. ES&S reviewed all other provisional and Election Day ballots to ensure that files were printed accurately.”
Lackawanna County Republican Party Chairman Dan Naylor asked the county to provide the party a list of every Republican that was sent an erroneous mail-in ballot. The county says more than 12,000 other voters in both parties combined received accurate mail ballots.
Hellbound and Down 