A final tally of some mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania may not be available for days, as a printing error has caused substantial delays in some cities, officials said Tuesday.

Thousands of mail-in ballots in Lancaster County, the battleground state's sixth most populous county, were deemed unreadable as election workers sought to scan ballots Tuesday, possibly delaying results in competitive races for the gubernatorial and Senate primaries. The glitch involved about 21,000 ballots, leaving at least one-third of them unreadable to ballot scanners. Officials said they have not received reports of unreadable ballots in other counties.

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“Citizens deserve to have accurate results from elections, and they deserve to have them on election night, not days later,” Josh Parsons, a Republican and vice chairman of the county board of commissioners, told reporters. “But because of this, we’re not going to have final election results from these mail ballots for probably several days, so that is very, very frustrating to us.”

The problem stemmed from an error by Pennsylvania-based vendor NPC, resulting in the company giving the county the correct ID codes to scan but sending the wrong ones to voters in the mail. Poll workers will have to sift through the affected ballots in a lengthy process expected to begin Wednesday morning that may take days, officials said.

The process will include one election worker reading votes aloud as a second worker marks the choice on a blank ballot, with a third worker observing the process.

The mishap was reminiscent of a similar problem during primary elections in the same county last year that occurred from a printing error from a different vendor. That vendor was since fired and replaced with NPC, which did not respond to a request for comment by the Washington Examiner.

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Amid the confusion, Lancaster County officials renewed their criticism of a 2019 law passed in the state that prohibits election workers from opening mail-in ballots before election day — a move they argue could have caught the errors ahead of time. The law also requires the county to hire an outside vendor to conduct ballot printing, which officials have pointed to as a cause for headaches in prior years.

Pennsylvania is one of five states conducting its primary elections Tuesday, joining Idaho, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Oregon.