Mercer County, Pa. - Mercer County Commissioners and county election officials are voicing their opinions on the election process to the Democracy Defense Project.

It's part of a bigger mission to make Pennsylvania elections more safe for candidates and voters.

The Democracy Defense Project is a group dedicated to keeping elections secure and safe, and strengthening voters’ trust in the election process.

The group met with former U.S. Representatives Jim Gerlach and Melissa Hart, former Pennsylvania House Speaker Keith McCall and former Governor Ed Rendell.

Gerlach, who is also on the Democracy Defense Project Board, said one of the biggest challenges he is hearing about is preparing for mail-in ballots. 

Pennsylvania is one of nine states that prevent local election officials from preparing mail in ballots for counting before Election Day. This leads to delayed results.

What happens is all these mail-in ballots just pile up in our county election offices, and it's not until Election Day, at 7a.m. can they start opening them and preparing them to run through the counter to be tabulated. And that's why in many elections, the results don't come for another two, three, four days,” said Gerlach.

The County Commissioners presented challenges that they’ve dealt with to the board. What Mercer County Commissioner chair Ann Coleman is looking for is uniformity at polls in counties across the state.

“We would like to see the state make some changes so that everyone understands how things are supposed to be done, and that we aren't making rules up as we go. We would like the state to say this is how you must do things so that when you come to the polls here in Mercer County, you know that we're following the law,” said Coleman. “We want to make sure that people have confidence in what's happening. And if there's uniformity across the state, then people have confidence in the results they see at the end of the day.”

Gerlach said Mercer County has a good, bipartisan system that includes volunteers working together to make sure the elections are fair.

“But it needs to be reinforced so that ultimately, at the end of the day, when votes are tabulated, regardless of whether your candidate won or didn't win, you knew it was a fair election,” said Gerlach.

The election process concerns will be taken to legislators. 

“There's still issues with our election code that need to be worked out through the legislature. And so we were finding out some of those practical day-to-day problems that our local folks face, and issues that eventually the legislature is going to have to rectify through a piece of legislation,” said Gerlach.