Schuylkill County Elections Director Albert L. Gricoski stamped a write-in candidate’s name onto test ballots Thursday to determine whether the ink would smudge the glass in the ballot scanning machine or bleed through the paper.

The test showed the stamped name wouldn’t leave traces of ink on the glass, nor would it seep through to the back side of the ballot.

That means Mary Jo Moss, who is running a write-in campaign for a seat on the county Board of Commissioners, won’t have any issues with voters using her name stamp to mark their ballots.

In order for a vote, including write-ins, to be counted, however, the voter must blacken the adjacent oval for the machine to read.

Using a name stamp on ballots is allowed by state election law; the Election Board cannot stop a candidate from using one, said county Solicitor Al Marshall.

Board Chairman Bob Carl asked “You believe there is no question that the act calls and allows for a stamper to be used, and we would have no grounds, as an Election Board, to deny the use of a stamper?”

“That is correct,” Marshall answered. “The act clearly disallows the use of labels or stickers. But it clearly says stampers can be used.”

Carl said he asked because “There are some people that I believe in the public that believe, based on no track record, that this board should consider denying this. We do not believe, based on Solicitor Marshall’s advice, that we have any grounds to deny this.”

After a voter uses the stamp, it must be taken out of the polling place, said board Chairman Bob Carl.

Voters cannot go back into the voting booth to retrieve a stamper.

If the stamper isn’t brought back out, poll workers must discard it.

Moss, a Republican, of West Brunswick Township, said she’ll put stickers on the stampers reminding people to take them back outside.

“The onus here is on the potential write-in candidate that they need to instruct the person they’re going to hand the stamp to do it a quick fashion, in the center of the block, and that would be effective,” said board member Mark J. Scarbinsky.

Moss said she would show voters how to use them.

Gricoski used the eight stampers Moss brought to the meeting is various ways to make sure they worked well.

“Everybody uses a stamper a different way,” he said.

He double-tapped the stamper, twisted it slightly, applied varying amounts of pressure, held the stamper down for different amounts of time to see if the ink would seep through, and waited for Christian Kimmel, the IT tech coordinator for the Election Board, to feed each ballot through the machine.

In all, he stamped 23 test ballots.

“There were some concerns about the ink being dry, or mostly dry before it goes into the machine,” said board member Jerry Knowles.

Even if the ink seeped through, it would not affect the ballot because there will not be any candidates’ names on the back side.

Moss pointed out that voters use a pen to darken the oval, so if the ink smudged onto the scanner glass, and the machine read the smudge on subsequent ballots as a vote, it would not be counted because the oval wasn’t blackened.

Kimmel said the numbers of write-in candidates are immediately tallied, but the tally of the candidate’s names takes a few days.

Carl noted that although unofficial vote tallies are released as soon as all the ballots are counted, including the number of write-in votes, residents will not know the actual number of votes each commissioners’ candidate has until all of the write-ins are counted.

“The write-ins have to be manually counted,” Knowles said.

That usually happened a day or two after Election Day, Kimmel said.

Moss, the first candidate in Schuylkill County to use a stamper, approached the board last month to make sure she would be able to use them.

She came in third in the Primary election for Republican nominees to win a spot on the ballot in the November election.

The stampers, she said previously, make it easier for both the voters and counters.

Each write-in candidate submits a list of possible variations of their names to Gricoski prior to the election so a misspelled or other than a full name would still be counted.

For example, a candidate may list her possible names as Trisha Marie McMillan, T.M. McMillan, or Trish MacMillen.