Mail-ballot mix-ups under scrutiny

Time enough before election to troubleshoot problems, experts say

BOSTON — Several high-profile cases of voters getting incorrect blank absentee ballots in the mail are raising questions about how often such mix-ups occur and whether they could affect this year’s presidential election.

Mail-in ballots are under heightened scrutiny this year as voters request them in record numbers amid the coronavirus pandemic and President Donald Trump expresses concerns against the process.

Problems occur during every election, but experts say there should be adequate time between now and the close of polls on Nov. 3 to resolve them.

“In a normal election year, there are stories of voting machines configured for the wrong precinct. As voters shift to voting by mail, the equivalent error is a batch of ballots mailed out with the wrong ballot style,” said Doug Jones, a University of Iowa election technology expert.

Elections officials, ballot suppliers and security researchers say such problems do occur with some regularity. They don’t necessarily indicate fraud, they say, but rather human error.

About 100,000 absentee ballots with the wrong names and addresses printed on the return envelopes were sent to voters in Brooklyn, N.Y., in late September. Ballots returned in envelopes bearing different names would risk being voided.

The city’s election board blamed the ballot- printer, Phoenix Graphics of Rochester, N.Y., which said it “experienced mechanical-inserting issues” in what was its first ballot-printing run for the affected counties.

And this week, an as-yet undetermined number of voters in Franklin County, home to Ohio’s capital, received the wrong absentee ballots, while 2,100 voters in Los Angeles were mailed ballots missing the presidential race and nearly 7,000 voters in Teaneck, N.J., were mailed ballots with the wrong Congressional race.

Franklin County officials did not offer an explanation, while a Los Angeles elections spokesman blamed an unspecified printing error but did not say who did the printing. Teaneck said a programming error by an outside vendor was to blame.

Older machines that insert ballots and return envelopes inside the larger envelopes mailed to voters can get jammed or otherwise send the process askew. Errors can be identified before they get mailed out by auditing a certain percentage. Newer “intelligent inserters” are less prone to error.

“It’s [typically] an operator making a mistake and just not turning something on, as simple as that sounds,” said Jeff Ellington, president of the Phoenix-based Runbeck Election Services, a major ballot printer. The insertion process is the most complicated part of vote-by-mail, he said.

In Los Angeles County, elections spokesman Mike Sanchez said every affected voter has already been mailed a corrected ballot.

“You can make the argument that if this same mistake happened on Election Day, there would be no time to recover,” said Ellington, the Runbeck president.

In other developments:

A federal appeals court on Thursday blocked a decision to extend the deadline for counting absentee ballots by six days in battleground Wisconsin. If the ruling stands, absentee ballots will have to be delivered to Wisconsin election clerks by 8 p.m. on Election Day if they are to be counted. The ruling makes it more likely that results of the presidential race in the pivotal swing state will be known within hours of poll closing.

A judge on Thursday set bond at $100,000 for two conservative political activists who are accused of using false robocalls to dissuade Black residents in Detroit and other Democratic-leaning U.S. cities from voting by mail. The magistrate entered innocent pleas on behalf of Jack Burkman, 54, of Arlington, Virginia, and Jacob Wohl, 22, of Los Angeles. Scott Grabel, the lawyer for Burkman, said the charges were an “absolute atrocity” and a “publicity stunt” by Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, a Democrat.

U.S. District Court Judge Mark E. Walker asked why the state of Florida on Thursday could not further extend its voter registration period after a computer meltdown earlier in the week might have prevented thousands of potential voters from taking part in November’s presidential election.

A voting rights group keen on expanding access to ballot drop boxes in November’s election is getting a second chance to make its case, after U.S. District Court Judge Dan Polster in Cleveland agreed Thursday to reconsider his earlier ruling. Polster had dismissed the A. Philip Randolph Institute’s case Tuesday, because he said Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose had issued a new order a day earlier that permitted ballot drop boxes at multiple locations within a county. That had been what the institute’s lawsuit was seeking. But LaRose’s office said, by allowing drop boxes “outside” boards of elections, his new directive was meant to restrict them to board property just outside the building — not to allow them off-site.