GOP Candidates Give Up Efforts to Watch Satellite Election Offices in Allegheny County

The settlement included an agreement for how Allegheny County will deal with the 29,000 ballots it mailed incorrectly, and any corrected ballots that are sent back.

PITTSBURGH — Two Republican candidates for Congress have settled a lawsuit they filed earlier this month and dropped their effort to force Allegheny County’s election board to let them send campaign representatives to observe inside satellite election offices.

The candidates dropped that claim in a settlement approved Monday by a federal judge in Pittsburgh that, instead, describes Allegheny County’s stated process for reissuing correct ballots to nearly 29,000 voters who were mailed ballots with the wrong contests on them.

Allegheny County officials have said that they would set aside any of the ballots that were mailed in by the affected voters and review them to ensure that only one ballot per voter is counted.

The candidates, Sean Parnell and Luke Negron, also contested Allegheny County’s plan to resend corrected ballots to the affected voters, instead of provisional ballots, but dropped that claim as well.

State courts have already rejected an effort by President Donald Trump’s campaign to force Philadelphia’s election board to allow its campaign representatives to monitor people registering to vote or filling out mail-in ballots in satellite election offices.