DELAWARE COUNTY, PA – A viral video that has been shared millions of times shows a Delaware County poll working filling out votes on blank ballots. Today, county election officials said that video was authentic, but taken out of context. Here’s why.
Adrienne Marofsky, PR director of Delaware County, Pennsylvania said there is a perfectly good excuse for the poll worker to be filling out blank ballots with a sharpie.
“The cropped video portrays an election worker, seemingly alone at a table, marking a ballot. The actual video shows the election worker at a table with other coworkers in a room full of people with bipartisan observers a few feet away at each end of the table, closely observing the worker from approximately 6 feet away,” Marofsky said
Marafosky said the poll worker was actually fixing damaged election ballots.
Marofsky said during the opening process, some ballots were damaged, so those ballots had to be recreated by hand by poll workers using a marker.
The Clerk of the Delco. Bureau of Elections instructed poll workers to manually recreate those ballots.
“According to the scanner manufacturer, Hart, the best practice to deal with damaged ballots that cannot be scanned is to transcribe the votes on each ballot to a clean ballot and scan the clean ballot,” Marofsky said.
Here’s the full explanation by the Delco. Board of Elections: