It’s the weekend before the General Election and already more than 11,000 people in Lycoming County have voted, according to voter services.
More ballots are expected over the weekend, according to Forrest Lehman, director of voter services for the county. He added that 15,000 ballot applications were received.
Absentee and write-in ballots are able to be received and processed by voter services until the Friday after the election. A recent Supreme Court vote allowed the three-day extension to receive absentee ballots, which is being hailed by Democrats as a win if Pennsylvania turns out to be a battleground state, as it was in the 2016 presidential election.
The state holds 20 electoral votes.
There are currently over 73,700 voters registered in Lycoming County. This is an increase of over 3,700 from the 2020 Primary Election. The total population of the county is roughly 113,000.
Lehman has anticipated that roughly one third of the election votes will be cast through the mail.
During the 2016 presidential election, over 52,000 votes were cast in Lycoming County, according to voter services. This will be the first general election that mail-in ballots are available to anyone who applies.
Roughly 10,500 ballots applications were submitted during the 2020 Primary, and 7,500 were returned, Lehman said.
The increase in mail-in ballots is a “seismic change on how elections are run,” Lehman said. On a standard presidential election year, the county may have roughly 2,500 absentee applications. At the end of 2019, the passage of Act 77 allowed any registered voter who applies to receive a mail-in ballot.
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