Why did county send 50K wrong ballots last year?
Franklin County Board of Elections officials and a vendor pointed the finger at each other for an error that resulted in thousands of absentee ballots being sent to the wrong voters in the 2020 presidential election.
A new report released Tuesday in response to a public records request shows that, while an unnamed board employee was logged into equipment that stuffed the wrong ballots into the incorrect envelopes, board employees said it was a representative from the vendor who disabled a scanner that would have caught the problem.
“While one may never know for certain who was at the keyboard when the error occurred, it is certain that the change was made inadvertently in the course of trying to troubleshoot a system error after an equipment failure and not a deliberate attempt to cause harm,” former elections Director Ed Leonard wrote in the Dec. 31 report to board members.
Technicians for Bluecrest, the equipment's vendor, were on-site at the board of elections on Saturday, Oct. 3, just days before ballots were to be mailed, to help resolve an error with the machine, according to the report. Leonard wrote that the optical scanner was disabled in an attempt to fix the problem, but it was never re-enabled.
Bluecrest maintains that it was a board employee who was logged in to the machine and not one of its technicians who was responsible for the error, according to the report.
The board declined on Tuesday to identify the employee who was logged in to the machine when the setting was disabled, citing security concerns.
"The report the board put together is thorough and transparent pertaining to what happened, including redundancies built into the system so a similar situation cannot happen again," board spokesman Aaron Sellers wrote in an email. "In the report, the board took full responsibility for the mistake. For safety and security reasons we will not be
releasing the name of the board employee that was logged into the system."
The report stemmed from a mishap with equipment that stuffs ballots into envelopes. That machine has an optical scanner that checks whether the correct ballot was going into the right envelope, but it was disabled.
The result: About 50,000 absentee ballots went to the wrong voters, and the Franklin County Board of Elections had to scramble for a solution during an election that drew record numbers of absentee ballot requests.
Almost as soon as the first wave of absentee ballots hit mailboxes the week of Oct. 6, problems emerged. Voters from Worthington, Hilliard, Whitehall and other parts of the county immediately noticed that their ballots were wrong.
Fewer voters who got incorrect ballots voted
The board sent replacement ballots to all affected voters and implemented checks to ensure that no voter could cast two ballots.
The Franklin County Board of Elections sent more than 274,000 ballots through the mail to voters who requested them and counted nearly 375,000 early votes.
The share of voters who didn’t cast a ballot was far larger among those who received a replacement ballot than the rest of the county, according to the report. Countywide, about 6.1% of voters who requested an absentee ballot did not return it, but more than 10.3% of voters who received an incorrect ballot never voted.
The early voting period was the busiest in the state’s history as elections officials encouraged Ohioans to cast ballots through the mail or at in-person early voting centers to avoid long lines on Election Day during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Changes made to prevent future problems
Since the discovery of the error, Bluecrest has altered the software on the ballot-stuffing equipment so that the optical scanner will reactivate itself whenever a machine operator starts the equipment to try to prevent future problems, according to the report.
Those changes make accidental disabling of the setting “functionally impossible,” according to the report.
The board also has installed a security camera near the equipment to monitor who accesses it.
Leonard, who left the board in December to take a new job as chief of staff for new Franklin County Prosecutor Gary Tyack, also recommended that board staff members be able to create their own login credentials that Bluecrest technicians not be able to access.
After the error was discovered, Ohio Secretary of State Frank Larose’s office ordered the board to adopt more stringent auditing of absentee ballots. In his report, Leonard wrote that standard likely would have helped the board identify problems before any of the ballots were mailed to voters.
“Regardless of the responsibility for disabling the Bluecrest scanner’s compare mode functionality, the (board of elections) bears full responsibility for failing to more fully and thoroughly review its audit pieces,” he wrote. rrouan@dispatch.com @Rickrouan