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By MARK SCOLFORO and MARC LEVY HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — Pennsylvania held a primary election Tuesday amid civil unrest, a pandemic, the introduction of new voting machines in some counties and the debut of mail-in balloting that pushed county election bureaus to their limits.Voters in some places were dealing with late-arriving mail-in ballots and a dramatic consolidation of polling places in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh to cope with the difficulty of recruiting poll workers fearful of the coronavirus.Officials in Philadelphia and its suburbs, in particular, were concerned that voters wouldn't receive their ballots in time for the post office to return them by Tuesday's 8 p.m. deadline.A heavily populated suburban Philadelphia county on Tuesday won a court decision extending the counting of mail-in ballots, a day after Gov. Tom Wolf a similar order for Philadelphia and five counties with protests over George Floyd’s death raging.In Bucks County, home to 461,000 registered voters, a judge ruled that the county can count any ballots that arrive by June 9, as long as they are postmarked by June 1. Meanwhile, in Philadelphia, lines were long at consolidated polling locations, made worse in some places by broken voting machines and delivery mix-ups of voting machines at other polling places, The Philadelphia Inquirer .Despite a fraction of the usual number of polling places opening in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, Department of State spokesperson Wanda Murren said the elections agency fielded no reports of significant problems by early afternoon. The lack of drama in the outcome of the presidential primary and the huge number of voters who opted to vote by mail means turnout was expected to be light.Polls opened at 7 a.m. and closed at 8 p.m., with social distancing rules in place at the still-open locations. Lawmakers the primary election from April 28 to avoid the height of Pennsylvania’s spike in coronavirus cases, and candidates and political parties have urged voters to cast ballots by mail.Ultimately, more than 1.8 million voters applied for a mail-in or absentee ballot, smashing expectations by state officials for the debut of the state's new vote-by-mail law and drawing warnings that contest results will be delayed well past election night.The result of the highest-profile contest on the ballot was a foregone conclusion. President Donald Trump is his party's presumptive nominee, and former Vice President Joe Biden won his party's nomination.There is only one competitive primary among the statewide races: There is a six-way race in the Democratic primary for auditor general. There are only two other statewide races on the ballot, for attorney general and treasurer.All 18 of the state’s members of the U.S. House of Representatives are seeking reelection, although only two have primary opposition. In the Legislature, all 203 House seats and half the 50-member Senate are up this year.Primary voters will also pick delegates and alternates for the two major parties’ presidential nominating conventions.Wolf’s mail-in ballots is limited to Philadelphia, Allegheny, Dauphin, Delaware, Erie and Montgomery counties, where his emergency declaration over the protests was active as of Monday. With an extension, Delaware County reversed a decision not to mail 400 ballots to voters after saying it had run out of time to get them out Monday along with 6,000 other ballots.Republican Party officials criticized Wolf’s order as violating constitutional protections that ensure equal voting laws, but had not challenged it in court as of Tuesday evening. In 2012, then-Gov. Tom Corbett, a Republican, used the , allowing counties that had to close their election offices in the days before the election because of Superstorm Sandy to extend the deadline to accept absentee ballots. Voters who do not receive their ballot in the mail can vote provisionally at their polling location. In addition, some counties were providing ballot drop-off locations.Meanwhile Tuesday, 22 counties were road-testing new paper-based voting machines, ordered by Wolf in 2018 as a bulwark against election meddling after the federal authorities said Russian hackers had targeted election systems in Pennsylvania and other states in the 2016 election.

Pennsylvania primary plows through unrest, pandemic