Some Centre County voters were made to vote provisionally without need, which postponed the counting of their ballots until after Election Day, one poll watcher said early this week.

Ellen Dannin, a law professor at Penn State Dickinson School of Law and poll watcher, sent a report a few days after the election to county commissioners and the Concerned Voters of Centre County voicing her worries regarding the use of provisional ballots.

Some people were made to vote by a provisional ballot because there was no place for them to sign next to their name on a supplementary list of voters, she said.

Dannin called it "extremely disturbing" in her report that some voters could not cast a regular ballot or came close to being unable to do so.

"I know that Centre County officials and residents care about elections and want them to be well run," Dannin wrote in her report. "However, and very unfortunately, that was not the case in this and some precincts."

Provisional ballots can be used if a person's name is not in the poll book or if they don't have necessary identification, Joyce McKinley, director of elections for Centre County, said. The provisional ballots are taken back to the elections office to be validated and tabulated but are not included in election night totals.

McKinley said 560 provisional ballots were cast countywide Nov. 4, with 394 fully counted, 30 partially counted and 136 rejected because they were not registered in the county. For comparison, 750 to 800 provisional ballots were cast during the last presidential election, she said.

Election officials counted the provisional ballots after the election, and final numbers were available Tuesday.

But looking at the big picture, provisional ballots played a minimal role, some say. Jon Eich, chairman of the Centre County Board of Commissioners, said about 75,000 people voted on Election Day in the county and that the overall number of provisional ballots used was small.

"I think we did everything we could on Election Day to direct people to the right polling place," Eich said.

Poll books began being printed about a week before the election, he said, and polling places received supplemental lists.

Eich said if the county uses the supplementary lists again, the practice would need to be changed so the list looks like the poll book, which includes a place for voters to sign.

Mary Vollero, chairwoman of Concerned Voters of Centre County, said voting provisionally was an inconvenience to voters and slowed the process.

"I think a lot of those issues would've been avoided if names on that supplementary list could have been incorporated into that regular poll book list of names," Vollero said.

But the overall process on Election Day went well, she said, considering the county had implemented a new optical scan system to work with and so many new registered voters.

"We're glad to see that most of the provisional ballots were counted," she said.