Mobile voter van helps 'cure' ballot mistakes in Pennsylvania county

Lower Pottsgrove Township, Pennsylvania ? Montgomery County Commissioner Neil Makhija wondered if the county could be like Uber and go to voters to rather than expecting voters to come to them.

Thus was born a mobile voter customer service experience in a transit van that has crisscrossed the suburban Philadelphia county for weeks, stopping at fall festivals, senior centers and colleges to fix issues with ballots, register people to vote and collect vote by mail ballots.

Makhija, who is also the chair of the county Board of Elections, said thousands of county residents have interacted with the van and other counties have talked about stealing the idea.

Instead of tossing an estimated 2,000 ballots for those kinds of errors, the van allowed the county to only have to only throw out 250, Makhija said.

He showed off the van, which was at the Lower Pottsgrove Township Building, one of three locations it would stop at on Election Day so people could drop off vote-by-mail ballots on Election Day.

Makhija taught election law for seven years as a University of Pennsylvania law professor, and studied the state's political processes as well as the problems that can exist county to county in a state that gives local officials a lot of autonomy over how elections are run.

"There are unfortunately a number of laws that allow counties to throw out people's ballot without even telling them, and that's over minor technicalities," he said.

Many counties across the country try to fix those technicalities through a process called 'curing.'

Pennsylvania, for example, requires a signature and date on the outside of the ballot envelope and for the ballot to be sealed inside a second envelope enclosed in that outside envelope. Local officials identify if those details are missing and are allowed to contact the voter by mail, phone and email to fix the issue. If the issue isn’t fixed in time the ballot cannot be counted.

More: Why it might take Pennsylvania and Wisconsin longer to count ballots than other states

Makhija said only about 10% of voters typically responded to the attempts to reach them.

So he thought, “what if we show up at their houses and let them fix any issues on the spot?”

Then, county officials realized that there is no law limiting how early ballots can be made available to voters, so they were ready to print ballots as soon as the state supreme court signed off on which candidates should be on the ballot, and were the first county in the state to make them available, he said.

Pennsylvania does not have traditional early voting. Instead, voters can request a vote-by-mail ballot in person and then fill it out and turn it back in immediately.

In many parts of the state that leads to long lines, and this year, a few lawsuits over how long people can stay in lines.

Along with the county locations, Makhija said Montgomery County also used the van as a satellite location that could rove wherever it was needed.

"What the van was able to do was to show up across the county ? senior centers, college campuses, places where people don't drive or fall festivals where there's just a lot of people ? and be available on the spot for you to register, request your mail in ballot and vote," Makhija said.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: In a swing state, in a swing county, an effort to fix ballot issues