Mail Ballot Tracker

Requests and returns are copied from the MCDC "G26 MIB Tracker" sheet maintained by Olivia Quinci, who pulls them from VoteBuilder: county party totals daily, municipality and precinct totals each Friday. This page re-reads that sheet and republishes it with the benchmarks below. If the sheet 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. "I" is VoteBuilder's non-affiliated bucket; minor parties are included in Total only, so D + I + R runs a few ballots short of Total. Montgomery Township's new precinct lines are not yet reflected in VoteBuilder, so its rows use the old precincts.

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

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.