Mail Ballot Tracker

Requests and returns come from the Pennsylvania Department of State's Statewide Mail-Ballot File, the state's own record of every mail-ballot application, which it cuts from the voter registration system once each business day and which carries each voter's precinct and registered party. The count is voters with an approved application whose ballot has not been cancelled, so a voter whose ballot was cancelled and reissued counts once. Return figures appear once the county has at least 200 returned ballots on record. Two other counts of the same thing are read every run and shown on the reconciliation card in the Pace section: VoteBuilder's mail-ballot records (through DNC Phoenix, the Democratic data warehouse) and the MCDC "G26 MIB Tracker" sheet that Olivia Quinci fills by hand from VoteBuilder. If the state file stops arriving for a week, VoteBuilder takes over as the source, then the sheet. If a feed stops updating, the "as of" line at the top goes stale and a warning appears.

Benchmarks. Mail ballot totals are the county's official per-precinct results (Montgomery County GIS election archive, "Times Cast" mail-in column, split ballot styles summed): 116,958 in the 2022 general and 174,409 in 2024, matching the county's summary reports and, for 2024, OpenElections on every precinct. Two precincts created after 2024 (Upper Dublin 3-3 and 6-3) did not exist in those elections and show no benchmark. Party splits (D / R / unaffiliated) come from the Pennsylvania voter file (vintage ) by the voter's current registration and are shares, not official counts; voters who have since left the rolls are not in them.

Party columns ("D vs 22", "R vs 22", "I vs 22"). A precinct's 2022 Democratic mail benchmark is its official 2022 mail total multiplied by the Democratic share of that precinct's voter-file mail history (same for R and I). "R vs 22" ranks highest-first because a Republican request rate far above the county's is the warning sign to watch, while D and I rank lowest-first because those are the ones to lift. Republican 2022 mail totals were small everywhere, so R percentages run high by construction.

Pace section (state file). The Pennsylvania Department of State publishes one row per mail ballot application for every election since 2020 (data.pa.gov, "General Election Mail Ballot Requests"), extracted from the SURE registration database once a day, with county, party, application, mailing-label and return dates, and the voter's congressional, state senate and state house district, but no precinct. This page reads the Montgomery County rows for 2022 and 2024 (final files) and the live 2026 file and lines them up by days before Election Day. Most of each year's count is annual-list voters whose applications carry January dates, which is why the lines start high and why "new requests since July" is shown separately. The 2022 and 2024 lines are rebuilt from final files by application date, the closest available comparison rather than a replay of what was known that day. Declined applications are excluded; cancelled ballots stay in, because the request happened. Party is the party on the application, with the state's Other/Independent bucket shown as "I" and minor parties in the total only. "Ballot label recorded" is the date the county queued a mailing label, which happens before the first mailing.

Districts. Precincts are assigned to the congressional, state senate, and state house district holding the majority of their voters; three precincts (Horsham 4-1, Lower Merion 11-3, Upper Dublin 2-1) are split and shown under their majority district.

Reading the pace column. A request is not a returned ballot. Requests as a share of 2022's final cast count tells you whether a precinct is on track to match its 2022 mail volume; the return rate (once returns begin posting after ballots mail on ~9/18) tells you whether requested ballots are actually coming back. The second number is the one that turns into a canvassing target, and the "Rank by" control switches to it when it becomes available.

"Needed to match county pace" is how many more requests a precinct would need for its requests-to-2022 ratio to equal the countywide ratio. It is a way of sizing the gap, not a quota.

Party columns. Party is the voter's registered party on the voter file. "I" is everyone who is not a Democrat, a Republican, or a minor-party registrant (no affiliation, no party, independent, other); minor parties are included in Total only, so D + I + R runs a few ballots short of Total. A few dozen people whose precinct on file is not a current Montgomery County precinct are counted in the county total but appear in no precinct row.

All figures are precinct-level aggregates. No individual voter data is published.

Sept 17, 2026, evening. The precinct and county figures now come from the state's own mail-ballot file. The Department of State furnishes its Statewide Mail-Ballot File, with each applicant's precinct and party, to any registered voter who signs an affirmation limiting it to political use, and the county committee's request was approved the same afternoon. This is the source VoteBuilder itself loads a day or two later, so the page no longer depends on the party's data warehouse and gets return figures from the same file. The county total moved from 91,483 to 90,357: VoteBuilder keeps a few thousand requesters who are not yet matched to its voter file and lags the state by a day. The VoteBuilder count is now the second column on the reconciliation card, with the MCDC sheet and the public copy of the state file beside it. Nothing is published below the precinct level.

Sept 17, 2026. The precinct and county figures now come straight from VoteBuilder's mail-ballot records, read each morning through the party's data warehouse (DNC Phoenix), instead of the MCDC sheet that was filled in by hand once a day for the county and once a week for precincts. Two visible effects. Precinct and municipality numbers now change every weekday rather than every Friday, and the "change since" column compares against the previous Friday. And the county total stepped up by about 5,700 (from 85,818 to 91,483) because the direct read counts every person with a live request while the sheet's VoteBuilder search applied the standard exclusions for deceased and moved voters; the new figure sits within a day of the state's own file. The MCDC sheet has not gone away: its total is now the third column on the reconciliation card, and the page falls back to it automatically if the direct feed stops.

Sept 12, 2026. Added a second source and a new "Pace" section. Until now every number came from the MCDC tracker sheet, which is copied by hand out of VoteBuilder. The page now also reads the Pennsylvania Department of State's own mail-ballot application file, which the state publishes every day and which reaches back to 2022 and 2024. That made three things possible: comparing this year with the same number of days before Election Day in 2022 and 2024 (instead of only against each year's final total), separating requests already on the books in January (the annual mail-ballot list) from new requests made since July, and showing the state's count next to the VoteBuilder count so the difference between them is visible rather than a matter of memory. The state file has no precinct column, so precincts still come from the MCDC sheet. Same day: the county's official 2022 and 2024 mail-ballot totals replaced an earlier estimate built from the voter file, which had run about 14% low and overstated the county's pace (85% became 73%). Republican columns were switched from "how far along" coloring to a watch signal, since a Republican request rate far above the county's is the thing to notice. Congressional, state senate, and state house scopes were added at Jason Salus's request. Late that evening we reproduced how the tracker sheet's VoteBuilder count is made (people, with VoteBuilder's standard exclusions for deceased and moved voters), which accounts for a bit over half of its gap to the state file.

Sept 11, 2026. First version, built the evening the MCDC tracker sheet was shared: county pace, party bars, a furthest-behind list, and a sortable precinct table, refreshed twice a day from the sheet.