Bucks County Commissioner Diane Ellis-Marseglia offered the apology during a meeting this week.
The commissioner of a Pennsylvania county at the center of a weeks-long ballot-counting controversy issued an apology on Wednesday after the state’s Supreme Court ruled to block the counting efforts.
At a Wednesday Bucks County Board of Elections meeting, Commissioner Diane Ellis-Marseglia—one of two county commissioners who had voted to count undated and misdated ballots for the Nov. 5 election—issued a public apology on a comment she had made last week. Their decision had gone against a recent Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling.
Last week, Ellis-Marseglia said that “people violate laws any time they want,” drawing controversy and criticism from local Republican officials.
“I think we all know that precedent by a court doesn’t matter anymore in this country and people violate laws anytime they want,” she said in last week’s hearing. “So for me, if I violate this law, it’s because I want the court to pay attention to it.”
A week later, on Wednesday, the commissioner said that her comment was taken out of context. However, she also apologized, saying, “The passion in my heart got the best of me, and I apologize again for that.”
“That was a hearing, and we were talking about provisional ballots. We were specifically talking about the fact that there were certain provisional ballots where a judge of elections did not sign and did not make sure that a voter signed on the outside envelope,” Ellis-Marseglia, a Democrat, said according to a video feed of the Bucks County commissioners’ meeting.
Elaborating, the official said that, to her, it is “frustrating and unconscionable that we would have to take away somebody’s vote” after an employee “didn’t know what to do or forgot or made a mistake.”
“That issue that I spoke on has now gone viral from my comments. It was genuinely not the best words. I would do it all again. I feel terrible about it. I should have been more clear, please, I will be more clear in the future,” she said.
