Thousands of provisional ballots were rejected in Pa. last year for errors. A new design aims to fix that.

Pennsylvania election officials are hoping that a newly designed envelope for provisional ballots will reduce the numbers tossed for technical reasons.

State law requires voters to sign provisional ballot envelopes twice for their votes to be counted. In recent years the number of ballots rejected due to these technical errors has increased, according to an analysis by VoteBeat Pennsylvania.

In November 2024, nearly 30% of the roughly 100,000 provisional ballots cast were rejected and about 17% of those rejected ballots had incomplete envelopes, according to the Pennsylvania Department of State.

Those ballots received intense attention during the counting process in last year’s Senate race, which saw Republican Dave McCormick narrowly defeat Democratic incumbent Bob Casey.

Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt, alongside Philadelphia City Commissioners Omar Sabir and Seth Bluestein, on Monday unveiled a new design that more clearly marks where voters should sign before and after voting and where election workers need to fill in information themselves.

“It’s important that the instructions and the materials are as clear as they can possibly be to reduce the likelihood of voters making an error,” Schmidt said in a new conference in front of Philadelphia’s City Hall.

Provisional ballots are used in a variety of situations where voters may encounter an issue at a polling place —oftentimes they are used when a voter requested but did not return a mail ballot or if they went to the wrong polling place.

Provisional ballots are counted after election workers review them to ensure that the voter is registered and did not already vote.

The effort was led by Philadelphia in partnership with several other Pennsylvania counties, but it is not yet clear whether the envelopes will be used statewide.

Unlike in an earlier statewide redesign of mail-in ballot envelopes, Schmidt lacks the power to order every county across Pennsylvania to use the new design. Instead, he said, the state is encouraging counties to adopt the new envelope and offered financial incentives, which a department spokesperson said would offset the cost of a change.

In the Philadelphia region, Delaware, Chester and Montgomery County officials said they intend to use the new envelope designs.

Jim Allen, the election director for Delaware County, said the county has already begun highlighting signature boxes on the envelopes and saw a reduction in errors as a result.

“We think we can apply those same color accents to this design and maybe even further reduce the prospect of errors,” he said.