The County Commissioners Association of Pennsylvania released its priorities for the year, and topping the list was election reform in the state.

On Thursday, Carbon County Commissioners’ Chairman Wayne Nothstein spoke about things the association hopes to achieve this year with regards to election code reform.

There are a lot of issues out there that should be addressed, he said, noting that the biggest things are extending the pre-canvassing period for mail-in and absentee ballots and moving the deadline to apply for mail-in and absentee ballots back.

Act 12 of 2020 permits counties to begin the pre-canvass or opening of mail-in and absentee ballots at 7 a.m. on Election Day.

“While these additional hours were helpful to some counties, for most it meant the prospect of essentially conducting two elections - both an in-person election and a mail-in election - on the same day, with the same resources. As expected, even with the ability to begin at 7 a.m., it took several days in most counties to fully process all of the mail-in ballots,” CCAP stated in its report.

CCAP also wants legislators to move the deadline for mail-in applications back to 15 days before the election rather than the seven days it was moved to this previous election.

“It (the current deadline) puts a huge burden on our election staff and it takes a lot of time to prepare it if we get several hundred (applications) as we did in the last election at the last minute,” Nothstein said. “It takes time to process these things, to get these forms out to the people and then they have to return it. It is just too short of a time.”

Nothstein said CCAP noted that these changes would help elections go much smoother and urged legislators to consider these changes before the primary election.