U.S. District Judge Nicholas Ranjan asked the Allegheny County Board of Elections and congressional hopefuls Sean Parnell and Luke Negron on Tuesday to try and strike a standstill agreement on how to process ballots returned from a batch of nearly 29,000 that went out to voters with misprints as a result of a vendor's error.
"No agreement was reached," said Thomas King, an attorney with Dillon McCandless King Coulter & Graham LLP representing the candidates. "We've been talking to them all day."
Parnell and Negron filed suit on Friday in a bid to force the Allegheny County Board of Elections to allow poll watchers into new satellite offices opened in order to allow voters to request, complete and return mail-in ballots.
The candidates said that poll watchers were doubly important given the board's announcement earlier this month that just under 29,000 ballots had been sent out to voters with misprints as a result of an error by vendor Midwest Direct.
According to court filings from the candidates, the board had started reviewing and setting aside impacted ballots in what the pair argued was a violation of state election code provision.
Judge Ranjan asked the parties in an order on Tuesday to try and reach an agreement on how to deal with potentially erroneous ballots as the court case plays out, but King told Law360 on Wednesday that the board had said it would continue sorting through and setting aside the misprints.
"They say they're following the directions of the Secretary of the Commonwealth, and we say, 'That's great, except that the Secretary of the Commonwealth has no authority to do that," he said.
On top of that, he said that a lack of poll watchers sets up the potential for errors, including voters returning the wrong ballot or bringing back a second ballot, going uncorrected.
"Everything they're doing now is with nobody there watching," he said. "It's not transparent at all."
A county spokesperson declined to comment.
In addition to settling on the handling of potentially misprinted ballots, Judge Ranjan asked the parties to try and reach an agreement over whether poll watchers for the campaigns could tour the facilities where the ballots were being stored and whether they could inspect the new satellite offices.
But King said the board had refused to make any accommodations for his clients.
The board announced at the end of September that it was opening seven satellite offices across several weekends to allow voters to request and return mail-in ballots, yielding what county officials have said is an estimated 27,000 ballots being returned.
While two poll watchers applied for certification to sit in on operations at the satellite offices earlier this month, the candidates said in their complaint that the requests were denied, because certificates — which generally only allow poll watchers to observe Election Day activity — hadn't yet been printed.
A similar case has been brought by President Donald Trump's reelection campaign over poll watchers being denied access to satellite election offices in Philadelphia.
That case resulted in a ruling against the campaign, with a judge finding that the offices were not official "polling places" under state election law.
The matter is currently being considered on appeal by the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania.
The Republican candidates are represented by Thomas King III, Thomas Breth and Jordan Shuber of Dillon McCandless King Coulter & Graham LLP.
Allegheny County is represented by Virginia Spencer Scott, Andrew Szefi and George Janocsko of the county law department.
The case is Parnell et al. v. Allegheny County Board of Elections et al., case number 2:20-cv-01570, in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania.
--Editing by Nicole Bleier.
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