Hitches at the start plague NYC mail-in voting

NEW YORK — Mail-in voting has gotten off to a rocky start in New York City, where election officials sent out a large number of absentee ballots with the wrong names and addresses on the return envelopes.

The faulty ballots were sent to an unknown number of voters in Brooklyn and could result in the voiding of those ballots if voters sign their own name on return envelopes bearing different names. More than 140,000 ballots have already been sent out so far across the borough.

The New York City Board of Elections blamed the problem on the Rochester-based vendor hired to print and mail the ballots for voters in Brooklyn and Queens.

The faulty ballots are limited to just “one print run” of ballots sent out to Brooklyn voters, the board’s director, Michael Ryan, said.

He didn’t say how many ballots were printed in that run but said that according to the vendor, the error “has been caught and corrected moving forward.”

All voters potentially affected by the error will receive new reprinted ballots and envelopes before the Nov. 3 election, Ryan said.

He said the move will “make certain that absolutely no disenfranchisement occurs in the borough of Brooklyn.”

But it’s unclear exactly how the city will handle situations in which voters already mailed back their completed ballot in the provided envelopes.

Meanwhile, the city elections board was also dealing with confusion regarding another printing anomaly on absentee ballots.

Ordinarily, absentee ballots in the city are sent out with the heading “Official Absentee / Military Ballot.” This year, the slash between “absentee” and “military” was left out, leading some voters to believe they had mistakenly been mailed a ballot for use only by members of the military.