Whoops! Pennsylvania’s Lackawanna County election office mailed last year’s ballots to 545 Republican primary voters in Scranton for the May 20, 2025 election. Voters caught the mistake and the county has now sent the correct ballot to those voters, the county said in a statement. Voters with a faulty ballot should toss it in the trash, including the envelope, the county says.
The county has an explanation for how this oddity happened, although the county did not explain how the error was not caught before printing or mailing. The 2024 primary ballot had presidential and Senate candidates—no one saw that before printing?
It is another example of the troubles that plague mail-in voting, and the control county election offices lose when they outsource the work taxpayers used to pay county workers to do to a third-party vendor.
In Pennsylvania, primary voters must be a member of the Democrat or Republican party. Independents don’t vote. Party members get different ballots and choose which members of their party to promote to the General Election ballot.
That is why only Republican ballots were affected. Also, a court challenge in the Scranton Republican mayoral race went past the print deadline, so Scranton Republican ballots were printed separately from the rest of the county’s.
Election Systems and Software (ES&S), a Nebraska-based voting machine company that also prints ballots, apologized and took responsibility for the blunder, said Beth Hopkins, director of the Lackawanna Department of Elections and Voter Registration, in a statement.
“During the printing process, an employee mistakenly pulled and printed a file from the 2024 election instead of the current 2025 election,” Kristy Ericson, ES&S director of ballot management services, said in an email, according to the county. “This human error in processing the files was missed in the quality check process. ES&S reviewed all other provisional and Election Day ballots to ensure that files were printed accurately.”
Lackawanna County Republican Party Chairman Dan Naylor asked the county to provide the party a list of every Republican that was sent an erroneous mail-in ballot. The county says more than 12,000 other voters in both parties combined received accurate mail ballots.
The Center for Election Confidence wrote in a May 6 letter to the county that it had heard from concerned voters and the center requested a meeting with election officials next week, “To discuss this matter and the steps the county is taking to protect the rights of voters now and in the future.” The letter from attorney Linda Kerns asks to review certain election documents during that meeting.
“Following the 2022 ballot paper shortage in Luzerne County that disenfranchised an untold number of voters, this situation in Lackawanna County is simply the latest example of serious election administration errors in northeastern Pennsylvania,” Lisa Dixon, executive director at The Center for Election Confidence, told The Federalist in an email.
Lackawanna County, one of the boyhood homes of former President Joe Biden, had a bumpy start in the 2024 general election. It was one of several counties that initially turned away Republican poll observers on election day, until the Republican National Committee intervened in court to obtain access.
Kamala Harris won the 2024 general election in Lackawanna County with 51.04 percent of county votes, compared to Trump’s 48.26 percent. In 2020, the county result reads 53.71 percent for Biden and 45.35 for Trump.
“The fight for election integrity and basic fairness for Pennsylvania voters is never-ending,” Kerns told The Federalist in an email. “Unfortunately, what we’ve seen over the past few elections in northeastern PA is representative of the continued importance of our work.”
Beth Brelje is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. She is an award-winning investigative journalist with decades of media experience.
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