After Ten Days Pa. Primary Election Has Results, But Why Does That Take So Long?

HARRISBURG (KDKA) - More than a week after Pennsylvania's primary elections, there's finally a winner for the Democratic nomination for State Auditor General.

Pittsburgh Controller Micahel Lamb conceded the race to former Philadelphia Mayor Nina Ahmad.

However, why did it take so long to find out who won?

In some elections, they are so close that it takes every vote being counted to know the winner and that was the case for some of the races.

There was also a failure to count all of the mail-in ballots in certain counties, especially Philadelphia.

Why slow the vote count in Philadelphia?

"The Board of Elections took a pause to make sure that people had not voted both in person and by mail," said
David Thornburgh of Committee of Seventy.

That's one reason why it took ten days to have enough results in for Michael Lamb to concede that Nina Ahmad had won the Democratic nomination as State Auditor General.

Believe it or not, however, we still don't have all the results in.

"I think they have may 60,000 votes left to count," Thornburgh said.

Allegheny County had as many mail-in ballots but got their votes counted the day after the election because they had eight high-speed vote scanners while Philadelphia had only one.

Thornburgh heads a Philadelphia watchdog thinktank.

"In contrast to Allegheny County, I think this has been more of a manual process because they didn't have the required or necessary equipment," he said.

Of course, even in Allegheny County, there were delays. State Representative Michael Puskaric only just learned he has won the Republican nomination by a mere 178 votes.

"Moving forward, we're going to have to take a look at the reforms we put in place, see how they were implemented, and really try to give the people a more predictable system moving forward," Puskaric said.