County: Computer bug caused duplication of ballots

Allegheny County says a bug in the state’s voter registration system is to blame for voters receiving multiple mail-in and absentee ballots in recent weeks.

In a statement released Thursday, the county’s elections division said that because of the high volume of ballots it has had to process for the June 2 primary, the state’s system — the Statewide Uniform Registry of Electors — is “timing out,” triggering an error message that when acknowledged, clears the queue and indicates that the labels are being sent to print.

“All of the labels are printing, but at some point, the system moves the records that were in the queue when the system timed out back into the queue, resulting in the labels being printed a second time,” the statement read.

Several voters have contacted the Post-Gazette recently about receiving multiple mail-in ballots. One said he received two ballots in two straight weeks, both sent to the same name and same address.

Though the county is encouraging those voters to return only one ballot and destroy any duplicates, the elections division said there are safeguards in place to ensure that duplicates are rejected and only one vote is counted.

The county points to the bar code on the label — used for tracking — that’s the same on each of the duplicates and, when returned, shows up as a duplicate when scanned. Those ballots are marked by staff as rejected and kept but not sent to the warehouse “to be counted or opened.”

Having received more than 170,000 applications for mail-in and absentee ballots as of Thursday morning and more than 32,000 filled-in ballots, the county — upon consultation with the state — has been advised to print labels in smaller batches, the statement read.

The county also has started “noting the applications in the queue based on [the] time they were processed,” which will allow officials to see which records reappear in the queue “so they can be manually separated from the system” and so that no duplicates are printed.

This is an issue, which was “just recently discovered,” that’s impacting only Allegheny County, the statement claimed.

The state’s voter registration system was the subject of an audit last December by Auditor General Eugene DePasquale. In its response to the audit, the Pennsylvania Department of State wrote that the SURE system is “reaching the end of its usable life,” and a spokeswoman said earlier this year that a new system will be up and running — on a “rough timeline” — in late 2021 or early 2022.