What happened with Chester County's pollbook printing problem?

An error that affected the ability of tens of thousands of Chester County voters to cast regular ballots on Election Day happened after county officials mistakenly failed to extract third party and unaffiliated voters from the state’s voter registration management database when creating a pollbook file for printing.

State officials say the county only extracted Republican and Democrat voters when the county prepared its pollbooks, leaving out the third party and unaffiliated voters. Pollbooks are lists of registered voters that workers use to check them in at voting locations.

“That is something that you sometimes see counties do, correctly, in a primary election,” Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt said, referring to the fact that third party and unaffiliated voters can’t participate in Pennsylvania primaries. “It appears that Chester did that pollbook extract and only included major party voters.”

While many Pennsylvania counties have switched to electronic pollbooks in recent years, Chester County is still using physical paper pollbooks. This means if there is an issue with the printing of those books, additional pollbooks need to be printed and delivered to voting locations, as was the case Tuesday.


https://penncapital-star.com/election-2025/what-happened-with-chester-countys-pollbook-printing-problem/