Crawford County voters get second chance

FORT SMITH — The Crawford County Election Commission will try to correct course after a programming error led to some early voters receiving incorrect ballots last week.

Commission Chairman Bill Coleman said Thursday 84 voters in Cedarville, as well as six outside of the city but in the same general area, were contacted via letters Tuesday and will have the opportunity to vote in the races they missed because of the error.

On Oct. 22, Coleman said the issue affected seven precinct parts in the Cedarville, Chester and Cove City precincts. A vendor for the commission, the Omaha, Neb.-based Election Systems & Software, originally sent a list of precinct parts that was alphabetized. The commission then took those precinct parts and assigned to them the ballot they were supposed to get.

“A different person up there called and they were going to send it back down again, and when they sent it that time, it was still alphabetized except … what they did, they used abbreviations on there: CH for Chester, CO for Cove City and CV for Cedarville,” Coleman said. “Well, that took Cedarville, instead of being ahead of Chester, it put it after Cove City.”

As a result of this, Coleman said the assignment for the ballot that the precinct parts involved were supposed to get was incorrect. It was the afternoon of Oct. 21 before any voter noticed there was an issue, although it didn’t take very long for the commission to get the issue fixed. The races affected include Congressional Districts 3 and 4, state House District 80 and Crawford County District 1.

Coleman said Thursday the largest number of votes affected were in Cedarville, with 84 voters being unable to weigh in on a deannexation issue there. There were also six voters who didn’t get an opportunity to vote in the Congressional District 3, state House District 80 and JP District 1 races.

“What we have done is we created paper ballots, and sent each of those voters a letter inviting them to come back either to our Emergency Operations Center [in Van Buren], which is an early vote location, or on Election Day to the polling site that’s in the city limits of Cedarville, and asking them that, if they are interested in voting in those races, to please come back and do that,” Coleman said.

The Election Commission will hand-count the ballots it will receive through this process and add them to its totals, according to Coleman.

Coleman explained about 28 voters outside of Congressional District 3, House District 80, and JP District 1 received a ballot with those candidates on them because of the error as well, although the commission didn’t know whether they voted for the candidates.

All the ballots cast during the early voting period up to Oct. 21 were sealed in a secure location separate from the rest of the early ballots so if commission deems it necessary, such as if a race is really close, it can manually go through them, pull out the ballots cast outside of those districts, and subtract them from its election totals.