Lancaster County’s issues with mail-in ballots earlier this year has prompted a state senator to suspend the use of no-excuse absentee ballots in the state for the next year.

Sen. Ryan Aument, R-Lancaster County, has introduced Senate Bill 914 to decrease the use of no-excuse mail-in ballots until adjustments can be made to the program.

Lancaster County, in Aument’s Senate district, saw 12,300 ballots printed out of order for the primary election, which meant those ballots could not be read by electronic ballot scanners on Election Day.

County employees had to count the ballots by hand in teams of three over the course of several days. One of the issues, according to Lancaster County Election Commissioner Ray D’Agostino’s statement to local media, is state Act 77, which doesn’t allow the Board of Elections to look at the ballots as they are returned. It wasn’t until the ballots were taken out of their secrecy envelopes that the error was found.

“First, more than 2,700 voters received incorrect instructions on how to return their mail-in ballot while voters in Mount Joy received the wrong ballots and return envelopes,” Aument wrote in his legislative justification. “Then, on Election Day, it was discovered that approximately 14,000 mail-in ballots had been printed with their pages out of order, making them unable to be read and tallied by the voting machines and necessitating a hand count. The errors were traced to Michigan Election Resources, the vendor Lancaster County contracted with to print, package, and send out mail-in ballots. Previously, most absentee ballots were prepped for mail and sent out from the county elections office. However, the volume of these requests after Act 77 have required counties such as Lancaster to turn to outside vendors for assistance. Though this particular vendor has taken responsibility for the errors, these examples have only added to the confusion and distrust surrounding mail-in voting in my district.”

Counties received more than 550,000 mailed ballots in the third election in which no-excuse mail-in voting became an option for Pennsylvania voters, according to the Department of State. The agency said in-person turnout was typical. York, Delaware and a few other counties ran short, but state election officials said voters were able to use alternative means to cast their ballots on several proposed constitutional amendments, an open seat on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court and other statewide and local races.

“To that end, I intend to introduce legislation that would suspend the use of no-excuse mail-in ballots until the spring of 2023 or until elected leaders can come together to make the necessary adjustments to this law to address the various issues presented to the legislature as well as the most recent experience with a bad vendor in Lancaster County,” Aument wrote.

There were several issues during this year’s primary elections.

In Fayette County, the Department of State said it appeared that some ballots were “printed with an inaccurate barcode that would have allowed ballots to be optically scanned.” Those ballots were to be stored separately and counted by hand.

In Luzerne County, a vendor’s programming error caused Republican primary ballots to be mislabeled as Democratic ballots on some voting machines, officials said. County elections director Bob Morgan said the error only appeared on the screen, and the ballot printed correctly as a Republican ballot with GOP primary race results.

— The Associated Press contributed to this report