Schrodinger's Vote for the Spring-Ford School Board

As of Saturday morning, there were still about 4,500 mail-in ballots still t be counted in Montgomery County.

As of this writing (noon Saturday), longtime Spring-Ford School Board member Tom DiBello has lost his reelection bid by a mere three votes.

But wait 10 minutes and it might change.

The latest Montgomery county results

in the Spring-Ford School Board race

As I write this, there were still 4,500 mail-in ballots to be counted in Montgomery County.

Including Chester County results from Spring City, totals, as of noon, had Democrat Abby Deardorff with 1,765 votes, Democrat Erica Hermans with 1,650 votes and DiBello with 1,647. 

Tom McMonigle, the other Republican vying for the two open seats in Region 3, so far has 1,633 votes.

There was hope, at least at this keyboard, that after last year's chaotic presidential election that mail-in voting procedures would have been tightened up for this year's local races.

Sadly, in Montgomery County at least, they seem to have gotten worse.

So I'll write eight words here I never thought to write. "I agree with Montgomery County Commissioner Joe Gale."

The latest Chester County results for Spring-City, which is part of the Spring-Ford School Board race for Region 3.

That was not easy. But to be clear, before anyone comes down with the vapors, I don't agree with him entirely.

I don't agree with him that expanding mail-in no excuse voting during a pandemic was a bad idea.

And I don't agree that it should be reversed. For the most part, mail-in voting is convenient and secure. 

I use it and prefer it. I can mull over the ballot, research candidates I know little about (judges) and take several days if I want without keeping anyone waiting in line for their turn.

Joe Gale, Montgomery County's sole

Republican commissioner

And since we refuse to make Election Day a national holiday -- I mean why would a country built  entirely around the idea of the people's ability to choose their government want to do everything it could to ensure the people's voice is heard? -- mail-in voting means fewer people miss the chance to vote because of work or other obligations.

Hell, you can vote at 3 a.m. if you want (not recommended) with mail-in voting.

And I certainly don't agree, as Gale argued recently, that Act 77 which made it all possible is in any way un-Constitutional.

Where I do agree with Joe Gale is his characterization of the handling of this year's mail-ins as "a fiasco."

The primary cause, in my view, is the issuing, last month, of 16,000 mail-in ballots which were blank on one side.

Image from screenshot

Chip Gallaher

“We sincerely regret that this happened and are working with the county and state to ensure impacted voters receive a new ballot,” said Chip Gallaher, CEO of NPC, the private company printing the ballots for Montgomery county.

Although they stopped production of the incorrect ballots, it was not before they were mailed out.

And despite the people who received them being informed, and instructed to destroy them and await new ballots, some folks filled them out anyway and sent them in.

Three points here: 

First: What is the penalty to NPC? 

Throughout all the re-assurances of transparency, corporate regret and our votes being secure, I have yet to hear the word "accountability."

I would hope there is a penalty clause in their contract for screwing up their most important responsibility. Otherwise, what is their motivation to get it right next time?

Second: The other problem, as stated by the county, is "the county encountered a higher than usual number of ballots that cannot be read by the ballot scanners."

Again, whose fault is this? Is it the company that made the scanners that we taxpayers paid millions to buy? Is it because voters can't follow instructions and fill out the ballot the correct way? (Sadly, more believable). 

The front page of a sample ballot in Royersford,

which is part of the tight Region 3 Spring-Ford race.

Third: How does any of this increase voter confidence? Luckily, the incorrectly printed ballots were blank on the back side, where votes for judges were cast. 

This means, at least in the Spring-Ford race, that if any of the incorrect ballots received were from voters in Spring-Ford, their votes for the school board race are clear.

More broadly, consider the case of Berks County, which got the date of election day wrong -- TWICE! 

The first time was in ballot instructions to Spanish language voters; and then again in a letter to poll workers.

I often tell people who see conspiracy to ask themselves if incompetence meets all the same circumstances, as it is much more likely to be the case.

Nevertheless, in a political atmosphere in which the Trump-led narrative lie of vote tampering is already proving disturbingly long-lived, anything that undermines voter confidence is a serious problem.

Given that the mail-in ballot method is preferred by Democratic voters, the Democrats who control Montgomery County government in the third largest population center in the state are not doing themselves or their party any favors by failing to operate their mail-in ballot systems problem-free.

It just pours gasoline on the lie that the elections are rigged. 

Which brings us to me, and my peers in the media. We are also pouring gasoline all over the place.

For my entire professional career, and for several generations before I learned to type, election results have been known on election night, or shortly thereafter.

It was not always thus.

When our country was founded, slow communication and transportation meant the results of an election were often not known for weeks, maybe even a month.

Voters, for the most part, accepted this reality. But most of us, especially those who ignore history, base most of our views on our personal experience so any change in a lifetime of expectations, even if its happened before, is often viewed with suspicion.

As technology improved, and media became faster, the wonder of immediate results and "exit polls" became the norm.

Image from screenshot

But mail-in votes take time to count. And since Harrisburg refuses to let them get counted in Pennsylvania before election day, it means we have to wait for results.

We media-types should have learned from last year's election. Instead, on election night auto-pilot, I committed the customary crime of our modern times -- "this is the way I've always done it" -- and began to dutifully compile results, most of which were from election machines and cast on election day.

Not surprisingly, because this is the preferred method of Republican voters, this meant the first results showed the GOP winning everything everywhere.

At this point, my heartfelt thanks go to a person I've never met, except on Twitter. 

According to his Twitter profile, Alex Teplyakov is "PA House Democratic Caucus; Secretary & PA-157 Leader, Chester County Democratic Committee, Phoenixville, PA"

After I Tweeted that the GOP candidates had taken all the open Owen J. Roberts School Board seats, he reminded me that mail-in votes had not yet been counted in Chester County and, as they were, were already changing those results. 

"It's too soon to be writing headlines" he Tweeted.

He was right.

And sure enough, when those results were counted (Chester County managed to count all its mail-in votes with relative speed) the result was nearly the exact opposite. Democrats took three of the four open seats in OJR and my Tweet, despite being quickly deleted, had contributed to election misinformation -- the exact opposite of the local media's job.

All of which brings us back to Schrodinger's Cat, or in this case, his election result, and the lessons I keep learning from Twitter -- another phrase I thought never to utter.

If you are unfamiliar, or have never watched "Big Bang Theory," the example of Schrodinger's Cat was invented in 1935 by a German physicist in response to an article written by Albert Einstein and two other physicists.

I'll spare you the science. Here, courtesy of Wikipedia, is the relevant passage: 

"He proposed a scenario with a cat in a locked steel chamber, wherein the cat's life or death depended on the state of a radioactive atom, whether it had decayed and emitted radiation or not. According to Schrödinger, the Copenhagen interpretation implies that the cat remains both alive and dead until the state has been observed."

In other words, until you know, either answer to the question -- "who won the election?" -- is correct. The answer, which exists inside the box (in this case, the ballot box) already exists, but is unknown until the box is opened. 

Here's why this is relevant.

Responding to another Tweet, this one a typical screed about the election being rigged, I Tweeted: "It's called mail-in voting. These votes were actually cast before election day, but the legislature refuses to allow them to be counted until election day, and they take a lot longer. If they changed that law and allowed them to be counted earlier, this illusion would disappear."

Image from screenshot

Then I thought, "so why aren't you reporting it that way dummy?"

For years, The Mercury had the latest deadline on the newspaper chain's press and, given a frenzied extra hour, we prided ourselves on getting late-breaking election results into the next day's paper that our sister papers could not. I further patted myself on the back for staying up late to continue to get those results and post them on our Website and, yes, on Twitter, so that readers would continue to know by the next day who had won.

But accuracy is more important than speed and I, and the rest of the speed-crazed media, need to step back and recognize this new mail-in-ballot-driven dynamic. 

Reporting results as they come in certainly turbo-charges any journalist's adrenaline system, but the narrative we're presenting does not exist and does a disservice to maintaining confidence in the integrity of the election system.

The results aren't changing over time, as we report. They already exist. We're all just waiting for the Schrodingers in county election offices to finish opening the box. Then we'll know.

On the bright side, this means I may get more sleep on election night.