Mail-in ballot snafu has some voters getting too many pages
Michael Gittings knew this year’s ballot was going to be a long one, but it wasn’t supposed to be as long as the mail-in ballot he said he received from the Broward Supervisor of Elections Office.
The ballot sent to him had seven pages, not the five it was supposed to contain. His ballot had three Page 3s, he said, getting in triplicate Broward’s sales tax increase referendum, three Florida constitutional amendments and two county charter questions.
The Lauderdale-by-theSea resident said he might have considered it a “oneoff” mistake, except the mail-in ballot sent to his wife had two Page 3s.
“One could be a fluke, but two, something is wrong,” Gittings said. "The odds of each of us in one family getting an error and no one else getting one is astronomical.”
The elections office has not received other reports of a voter receiving duplicate pages in their mail-in ballots, said Fred Bellis, Broward’s elections operations coordinator. The county’s ballot is five pages long, except for Hollywood voters, who have six pages, he said.
Bellis said if voters receive duplicate pages, they should contact the elections office at 954-712-1950. The vote-counting machinery would catch ballots that are returned with extra pages, he said. Those ballots would be brought to the attention of the canvassing board that oversees the vote count to determine if they would be counted.
But Bellis is skeptical of the claim by Gittings, who is currently in New Mexico on business and won’t be back in Florida until next week.
He contacted Gittings on Thursday, and the two got into a heated conversation before Gittings hung up on him.
“He was calling me a fraud. We need to see evidence,” Bellis said. “You have to show it to us so we can see the whole thing.”
Bellis said later that Gittings “was only interested in getting publicity.”
Gittings said he called the elections office Wednesday before contacting the South Florida Sun Sentinel, but no one ever returned his call. Bellis said his office has no record of a call from Gittings.
Gittings said he was just trying to bring a problem to the attention of the elections office and was upset with the call he received from Bellis.
“He was basically trying to call me a liar,” Gittings said.
Gittings wonders what would have happened if he hadn’t been paying attention and had concerns his entire ballot could have been invalidated.
“No matter what happens, it’s not good,” Gittings said.
There have been problems in the past with mailin ballots in the county.
In 2016, the amendment legalizing medical marijuana was left off a small number of ballots.
Another mistake that year involved the referendum on a county sales tax increase, that could have left voters confused. Instead of the referendum having a place to check “YES?SI/ WI” meaning yes in English, Spanish and Creole, it had a “Yes/Si/No.”