ALLENTOWN, PA - Wear a mask, keep a safe distance and bring your own pen. These are some of the recommendations made for Pennsylvania voters casting their ballots in today’s primary election.
"We’ve been social distancing, I’ve been wearing gloves, we have hand sanitizer and we’ve been staying 6 to 10 feet apart mostly so nobody has said anything or complained to us or seem to worry," says Beth Taylor of Macungie, "Everybody walking in has had masks."
But there’s been some confusion in our area this Election Day. In Lehigh county, COVID-19 closures caused polling location changes that led to confusion for some voters. Doug Albert from Schnecksville drove over twenty minutes from his regular polling place to physically submit his mail in ballot at the county government center in Allentown.
"We got ballots in the mail, my wife and I, and we didn’t mail them off in time so we went up to our polling place and they said you have to drop them off in person," he tells PBS39 News Tonight Reporter, K.C. Lopez, "So that’s why I’m here."
Poll workers in Allentown say they’ve had a handful of voters arrive at the wrong polling station only to be redirected.
"We’ve had a couple of them," explains Allentown poll worker, Nathan Nauroth, "This is usually 8th ward, district 7’s building but now we are sharing it with 8th ward’s district 5. We had a couple of people who normally go to St. Francis--they were looking around, St. Francis is closed so word of mouth didn’t get to them I guess, unfortunately."
Neighboring Northampton county has seen only two polling location changes, compared to Lehigh county’s more than 20.
"We’re having a pretty slow turn out but it’s a primary so we usually don’t have a large turnout anyway but it’s looking like it could be a little bit less but we’ll wait and see," Narouth explains, "I mean, people don’t have anything else to do today, with nothing on, nowhere to go, maybe they’ll get out and vote, hopefully."
