When it comes to voting after the most contentious election in modern memory last fall, it didn’t take much for critics to go into overdrive during the May 18 Pennsylvania primaries.

Three local counties - Carbon, Schuylkill and Luzerne - had some issues which may or may not have affected the outcome of some races. County officials, of course, tried to play down the significance of the glitches and to pass them off as human or computer errors.

Naturally, in the current hyperpartisan atmosphere where there are already suspicions about the accuracy of the voting process, it doesn’t take much to get the ball rolling.

Election officials characterized the glitches in the overall scheme of things as “minor,” and they consider them as “routine problems” that show up in virtually all elections, not “systemic flaws.”

Some Republican legislators, who have been calling for sweeping election reforms in Pennsylvania, see it otherwise and characterized the primaries as a “mess.”

In Carbon County, some precincts ran out of ballots for nonparty voters, so either more ballots had to be delivered or an electronic tablet was used to allow voters to cast their ballots.

In Schuylkill County, voters in some districts could not get access to machines because the code used by election officials would not work.

Meanwhile, in Luzerne County, Republican voters were confronted with the heading “Official Democratic Ballot” on the welcome screen when they attempted to cast votes for their party’s candidates.

As it is now, Pennsylvania is a “closed primary” state. This means that just registered Democrats and Republicans can vote for their respective party’s candidates in primary elections. If one of the third parties is able to get a ballot position, its voters are able to vote, but only for that party’s candidate or candidates.

For those of us who are registered nonpartisan (no party), independent or a member of a third party which has no ballot position, we are locked out of primary voting when it comes to voting for candidates. In the May 18 primaries, however, even we nonaligned voters could vote on four ballot questions.

You might imagine the confusion in Luzerne when Republican voters saw what they thought was Democratic information.

Actually, it turned out to be a typographical error which apparently several sets of proofreading eyes overlooked. When GOP voters turned to the next screen, all of the Republican information was visible and accurate. Still, it was enough to cause a major upheaval until the error was fixed.

Some judges of elections in Luzerne paused voting while others worked around the problem.

Luzerne election officials blamed the problem on a coding error with Dominion Voting Systems, which, in turn, led to the misprint on the introductory voting screen.

You may recall that Republicans, including former President Donald Trump, accused Dominion of illegal manipulation of voting machines during the 2020 presidential election.

The company not only denied the allegations but has filed multiple lawsuits against Fox News and a number of Republican officials for making what it alleges are slanderous and inaccurate comments about the company.

Luzerne County’s Director of Elections Robert Morgan said Republican votes on the machines were counted correctly because the ballots print out with proper Republican voter information. If a coding error can cause a typographical error, what else can miscoding do, some voters are wondering, and stuff like this makes a conspirator’s day.

To try to resolve this problem as amicably as possible, leaders of both parties in Luzerne agreed to have all voting machines locked and secured in the event an audit is sought, according to Luzerne County Republican Committee Chair Justin Behrens.

In York County, some voting districts ran out of Republican paper ballots, but voters were still able to cast ballots using a computer touch screen. Some voters in Lower Windsor Township who reported the same problem were told to come back in several hours. Well, you know that not all of them did.

That’s the problem when something like this occurs. Busy people who have work or other obligations have a narrow window of time to devote to in-person voting, so if this allocation of time is interrupted or shut down completely, these votes may never happen, and in close contests this can make all of the difference.

York voter Donna Huckenberry said it perfectly: “I think it’s ridiculous. How can you run out of ballots?”

How indeed?

By Bruce Frassinelli | tneditor@tnonline.com

The foregoing opinions do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editorial Board or Times News LLC.