Officials in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, are scrambling after approximately 20,000 electors received ballots with errors. Now, those electors may have to cast a second ballot.
WGAL reported that this is not an isolated incident, as it is the third time in as many years that the county has mailed incorrect ballots. Some electors who had already voted received emails from the county informing them of the problem.
“Your ballot status has been updated to cancelled because a replacement ballot has been issued. If you have questions about your ballot, please contact LANCASTER County at (717) 299-8293,” part of the email said.
“Several viewers contacted News 8 On Your Side asking if the email was a scam. It’s not. The board of elections said the error involves the Superior Court race. Voters were told to only select one candidate when they should be able to choose two. Before that error was discovered, 18,554 ballots were processed to be mailed to voters. Those ballots are being recalled from post offices, and corrected ballots are being sent out,” WGAL reported.
“Everyone who got mailed a ballot, whether they got it or not, is going to get a replacement ballot. Everybody who requests a mail-in ballot for this election will have something called a replacement ballot. It will say ‘replacement’ on it. If you have a ballot that doesn’t say ‘replacement,’ please discard it. You will get a replacement ballot,” County Commissioner John Trescot said to the news network.
The revised ballots will have corrected language and instructions that are color-coded.
“Our concern here is that people will receive that first ballot, fill it out, send it back, think they’ve done their civic duty, and then when they receive that replacement ballot in a week or two, they will think it’s junk mail or a scam, and throw it in the trash, and their (first ballot) won’t be counted,” Democrat committee member Erin Gibson said to LancasterOnline.
— Mark Scolforo (@houseofbuddy) April 17, 2023
Lancaster County election officials noticed that one ballot instructed voters to pick only one candidate to nominate from their party, when in fact voters could pick two. https://t.co/mEPdjuA5pi
— KYW Newsradio – NOW ON 103.9 FM! (@KYWNewsradio) April 18, 2023
The Lancaster Online website reported:
In the 2012 primary, election officials detected an error that was attributed to Claysburg-based ballot printing vendor NPC. The company has accepted responsibility for the error, which affected the bar codes on approximately 16,000 ballots and prevented them from being scanned correctly. The error necessitated the manual transfer of votes onto fresh ballots.
Officials from Lancaster County collaborated with NPC to improve error flagging prior to printing, a move that helped persuade the board of commissioners to continue working with NPC.
After printing errors rendered thousands of ballots unreadable by elections office machinery, Lancaster County terminated its contract with Michigan Election Resources, now known as Plerus, in 2021 and filed a claim for more than $23,000 in damages. The county personnel was required to manually copy 12,630 ballots for four days.
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Hundreds of voters cast their ballots in the wrong races during the November midterms after election officials provided erroneous updates to voter lists in Nashville, Tennessee. According to the Associated Press, more than 430 Tennessee voters were affected when officials did not follow the correct steps to make sure voting lists were accurate, a state elections coordinator noted in a review that was released in January. CONTINUE READING…
