Cambria County officials continue working to close out last week’s election after problems with the ballots They were forced to duplicate the ballots into new ballots that could be scanned by computers.

The unofficial results have not yet been certified, but officials said they expect that to happen Thursday, but they say all Election Day ballots have been officially counted.

Officials say they finished counting regular Election Day votes shortly after 2 a.m. Saturday and finished counting provisional ballots on Monday.

Cambria County Attorney Ron Repak Jr. said one of the reasons the vote count took so long is because they were originally expecting about 35,000 ballots that would have to be counted manually or duplicated, but it turned out to be about 65,000. tickets.

He also said there were more than 800 provisional ballots compared to about 30 they normally have. There were many more provisional votes because the two hours that the polls were extended only allowed provisional votes. According to officials, around 650 of them are being accepted.

Officials add that there are still about 130 military and foreign votes left to be counted, and an audit is underway in three county precincts, or about two percent of the votes Repak said were due.

The election board will meet again at the county courthouse Thursday at 3 p.m. and said the goal is to have that completed by that meeting.

Officials continue to make sure all ballots were counted correctly and say possibly the hardest part of the last week has been not having a precedent for what to do in this situation.

“I think the challenge is never having done it before, never seen it before and just trying to understand how we develop a process, a protocol and a chain of custody,” Repak said. “I think the process has been the main thing. I think communication is something we are going to focus on as a priority.”

Repak says when everything is finalized for this election there will be an investigation into why the ballots couldn’t be scanned by the computer even though officials say the ballots they tested worked and the mail-in ballots worked, but he says at this moment yes. I don’t have an answer.