Last year, thousands of provisional ballots were rejected for errors. The new design aims to change that.
In November of 2024, approximately 30% of the roughly 100,000 provisional ballots cast in the election were rejected. About 17% of those ballots had incomplete envelopes, according to the Pennsylvania Department of State.
While provisional ballots account for a small percentage of total votes cast in the Commonwealth, they can be critical in deciding close races.
Pennsylvania officials have announced a newly designed envelope that aims to fix this problem.
State law currently requires voters to sign provisional ballot envelopes twice for their votes to be counted. The new design announced by Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt on Monday more clearly marks where voters should sign before and after voting, and where election workers need to fill in information for themselves.
“It’s important that the instructions and the materials are as clear as they can possibly be to reduce the likelihood of voters making an error,” Schmidt said in a news conference in Philadelphia.
It is unclear where the ballots will be used. Schmidt does not have the jurisdiction to order every county across the state to implement the new envelope design, but he is encouraging counties to do so. He is also offering financial incentives that would offset the cost of a change, according to a department spokesperson.
Officials in Delaware, Chester, and Montgomery Counties have said they plan to use the new envelope design.
Jim Allen, election director for Delaware County, said the county saw a reduction in errors after highlighting signature boxes on provisional ballot envelopes.
“We think we can apply those same color accents to this design and maybe even further reduce the prospect of errors,” he said in a recent interview.
Provisional ballots were a focus during the counting process in last year’s Senate race between Republican Senator Dave McCormick and then-Senator Bob Casey. The race was extremely narrow, and provisional ballots were an important part of the counting process.
The new envelope design aims to reduce the number of provisional ballots tossed out so they can be counted in upcoming elections.
