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Roughly 100 voters and election workers filled the tiered seating of the wood-paneled courtroom on the top floor of Chester County’s Judicial Center Tuesday night to hear how the county had misprinted its pollbooks last November, and to express their frustration at county officials for the debacle.
Two lawyers from West Chester-based law firm Fleck Eckert Klein McGarry LLC, which the county had hired to investigate the episode, sat at the prosecutor’s table and delivered their findings to the general public seated on their left and the county commissioners on their right.
On Nov. 4, 2025, pollbooks used to check voters in at polling places didn’t include the names of Chester County’s more than 75,000 unaffiliated and third-party voters. Those voters had to either wait for supplemental pollbooks to be delivered or use a provisional ballot, an option used when there is some question about a voter’s eligibility. The error forced about 12,600 voters in the county to cast provisional ballots, or roughly 6.4% of the county electorate — more than in any other recent election. Almost all of those ballots were eventually counted.
At the nearly three-hour meeting, the public learned more about the precise nature of the failure, as well as how the county planned to prevent the issue from happening again.
Checking one wrong box led to big problems
Attorney Sigmund Fleck gave the simplest, purest explanation for what happened: “This appears to be a human error in clicking a wrong box,” he said. But that human error was compounded by other missteps in the county’s processes.
Fleck explained that the two employees who generated the pollbooks ahead of the 2025 election were inexperienced, having just one election’s worth of previous experience between the two of them. During the primary, one of them used a training aid from the Department of State on the Statewide Uniform Registry of Electors, or SURE, system to help them generate the pollbooks for that election.
While doing so, the employee had annotated the training guide with notes indicating which boxes on a particular screen needed to be checked — including one box, under the prompt “Voters to include,” that said “only voters for the major parties.”
This box, Fleck explained, was added to the SURE system by the Department of State to make it easier to generate pollbooks for primary elections, in which generally only major-party voters can participate. And while the Chester County employee had written in margins “Dem Republicans only” and “Presidential do not select,” they hadn’t noted that this box should be left unchecked for any November election, not just the presidential. Fleck said the Department of State confirmed this box was selected when the pollbooks for last November’s municipal elections were generated.
However, Fleck did not blame this employee alone. He said that the employee generating the pollbooks “had not had the benefit of any formal training,” only informal “on-the-job” training, and that they weren’t supervised.
Crucially, the investigation found that there was no system in place to check the accuracy of the pollbooks after they were generated from SURE and before they were sent to the printer.
The report recommended, among other things, that the county implement supervision for critical tasks, add spot checks to catch errors, and work with the Department of State to make changes to the SURE system and associated training.
Some of those changes are already underway. The Department of State says the updated version of the SURE system, which is currently in development, will include warning screens that let users know they are about to generate a pollbook that excludes some voters. The county will implement a dual-signature verification process for critical tasks that could affect the entire electorate, including pollbook generation. The county will also build spot checks for the pollbooks into its pre-election process and create its own employee training program, among other reforms.
Residents call for election official’s resignation
But for some county residents at Tuesday night’s meeting, the planned reforms weren’t enough.
“In describing the pollbook error, people are confusing the technical simplicity of the mistake itself with what we should be and are actually investigating,” Michael Albaladejo, a judge of elections in Valley Township, said. “The concerns are more why it wasn’t caught.”
Many commenters felt they had an answer for the root cause of the issue: the county’s election director, Karen Barsoum.
Among other election officials in Pennsylvania, Barsoum has a reputation as a competent, professional director of one of the state’s largest counties. But in a recent article in The Philadelphia Inquirer highlighting her department’s high staff turnover, some former employees accused her of creating a “hostile work environment.”
One former employee, Nate Prospero Fox, came Tuesday night to make just that case. He had worked at the department nearly continually from August 2020 through April 2024, meaning his employment spanned the timeframe before and after Barsoum took over as director.
“Sixty-seven counties face the same exact issues,” he said, referencing the threats and stress many election workers face nowadays. “Except for one: management.”
“Please tell me why [those other counties] have half the turnover.”
Fox, wearing a blue blazer and khakis, said he would have remained with the department his entire career if not for its management, and he ended his remarks by imploring the commissioners to “fire Karen Barsoum.” As he walked back to his seat, he stared down Barsoum, who sat in the back row of the jury box, as many in the crowd applauded.
Barsoum faced other pushback following the election, including a campaign from a local blogger to fire her, which included her face as the missing person on a milk carton. A local radio station also ran two versions of a jingle, which were enhanced by artificial intelligence, titled “Time to Go, Karen,” as part of a listener contest.
While the investigators’ report acknowledged some complaints about Barsoum’s leadership, it concluded that it wasn’t the main cause of the pollbook error.
Fleck noted that one of the complaints about the department’s leadership was micromanaging, but a big part of what led to the generation of the incorrect pollbooks was a lack of any supervision in the first place.
Many of those who spoke up at the meeting took issue with the limited scope of the firm’s investigation. Specifically, they were unhappy that investigators hadn’t interviewed any former employees and argued that it was impossible to determine if there was a leadership issue without doing so. They also noted that the finding that low pay contributed to the turnover was based on a single employee’s experience.
Both the county’s spokesperson, Andrew Kreider, as well as Commissioner Josh Maxwell, who chairs the board of elections, declined to say whether the county planned to terminate Barsoum. Barsoum told Votebeat she would not resign and planned to implement the report’s recommended improvements.
“As for the public testimony, it is noteworthy that the comments come from individuals who were either terminated or left due to poor performance,” she said via email. “Working in Voter Services has become a more stressful job in recent years, and the comments come from those who could not adapt to the stress.”
Chester County residents offer many opinions
At times, the rancor at the meeting was directed not only at the county and its employees, but also at fellow citizens. Maxwell at one point had to remind participants not to give each other the middle finger to express displeasure at one another’s remarks, shortly after one commenter had called others “nutjobs.”
The commenter was reacting to a panoply of election conspiracy theories and general mistrust in elections, ranging from admiration of U.S. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s role in investigating the 2020 election to questions about the susceptibility of vote tabulation machines to hacking.
On the other hand, some speakers, while acknowledging the county’s mistakes, gave it credit for reacting quickly on Election Day to mitigate the issue and working diligently to address its failings.
Among them was Marian Schneider, a Chester County resident who is also a longtime voting rights lawyer who has experience working on high-profile election issues for the American Civil Liberties Union.
“Everyone in this room knows that a grievous error was made, and everyone is upset about it, so we can stop the browbeating and focus on the path forward,” she said. “I just invite the voters of Chester County to allow the county to do the work — and there’s going to be a lot of work as you recognize and the report shows — to address the issue and make changes.”
Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.
