Pennsylvania’s first attempt at mail-in ballots is a challenge for county election bureaus, and could cause a delay in the release of accurate results.

The state authorized mail-in voting last year, but it surged in popularity after COVID-19 as a way to prevent gathering at polling places around the state.

While many mail-in voters cast their ballots days ago, the deadline to submit them was 8 p.m. Tuesday, the same time polls closed.

As a result Carbon planned to count them starting Wednesday morning. Director of Elections Lisa Dart said she expects that all mail-in ballots will be sorted and counted by the end of the day Wednesday.

“We’re going to start fresh, opening and scanning ballots. We should be scanning by midafternoon,” Dart said.

In Carbon County more than 6,680 people requested ballots. 5,396 returned their ballots before Tuesday.

Schuylkill County took a different approach. The county had more than 13,000 applications for ballots. As of Tuesday, more than 8,500 had been returned.

They started counting mail-in ballots Tuesday afternoon at 1 p.m. and had about half done before polls closed. They hoped to finish counting Tuesday night, but said it would be possible that they would return on Wednesday.

“It’s a learning curve. It seems to be going pretty well,” said county Commissioner Barron “Boots” Hetherington.

Carbon officials said processing a mail-in ballot is much more time consuming than voting machines. In-person votes are recorded digitally and downloaded immediately after the polls close.

Mail-in ballots have to be opened, sorted, then scanned into a machine which counts them like a regular voting machine.

If the machine rejects a ballot then workers have to review it themselves.

With many counties across the state still furloughing employees due to coronavirus, there may be fewer workers to count the ballots.

Some voters failed to sign the back of their ballot as required by law. Carbon voter registration reached out by phone and email and gave the voter a chance to sign the ballot. People who didn’t respond had their ballots tossed.

Voters who requested in-person ballots could still complete a provisional ballot if they were worried their mail-in vote wasn’t received.

The voter registration office is going through each provisional ballot. If that voter’s mail-in ballot was counted, the provisional is thrown out.

Due in part to mail-in voting, and a small number of contested races, turnout at the polls was light. Carbon’s voting machines, which were used for the first time in the November 2019 election, performed well, Dart said. There were no database issues which caused the system to display inaccurate vote totals during last fall’s election.

There were no reported issues in Carbon County regarding PPE. Voters weren’t required to wear masks to the polls, but workers were. Dart said she hadn’t heard of any cases where a person who wanted a mask to vote was unable to get one.