SMITHFIELD – On Firiday, the Johnston County Board of Elections began contacting 338 voters who, due to a human processing error, will likely receive two absentee ballot packets in the mail in the coming days. Thankfully, because of ballot security protections built into the election system, only one of those ballots can be counted.
An error by a County staff member caused two mailing labels to be printed for these voters, leading to two absentee ballot packets being mailed to them.
Election officials are contacting the affected voters and advising them to destroy and discard one of the packets and complete and return the other. Even if a voter sent back two ballots, only the first one would count.
This is because the barcodes on the absentee ballot envelopes are specific to each voter, and the state’s election management system will only accept one ballot for each voter. If a second ballot for the same voter is returned, when the ballot envelope’s barcode is scanned, the system will flag the ballot for rejection.
“This was an unfortunate mistake, but we identified it and are immediately notifying the affected voters,” said Leigh Anne Price, Johnston County elections director. “These voters will be able to cast a ballot, and there is no possibility that this will affect election results,” Price added.
The Johnston County Board of Elections was able to determine the total amount of duplicate packets sent to voters by manually sorting through more than 3,000 mailing labels. Price has contacted State Board of Elections staff to make them aware of the situation.
If the election is real tight and it comes down to a hand count, would they still be counted mistakenly?
A “mistake” hmmm…. interesting
Can we see the demographics of who received more than one ballot?
Yea rite we shall see come November right Smithfield?? 👀🙄
This is BS!
Here we go again 2020 all over again why can’t everyone oye in person?
Tell us, we’re they registered Republicans or Democrats
Mass mail in ballots are ripe for fraud. People can pay people to fill theirs out a certain way. Then you have the drop boxes. Ballot Harvesting. There needs to be integrity and confidence in our elections. There isn’t because of mass mail in ballots and drop boxes. Then of course we had interference from our own intelligence agencies to help Biden in 2020. Same with Big Tech and the media. Also google Time magazine Shadow Campaign. Came out after the 2020 election. Conservatives had every right to be outraged. I was. I paid attention and saw it all.
I would be curious about what party the 338 are Registered as.
They were probably sent only to Republican’ts since the JoCo BOE is run by Republicans. No issue here those who received the extra ballots will only be able to vote once since the ballot numbers are recorded when the are mailed out. Don’t make a mountain out of a mole hill.
Keep sucking in the lies.
Barcode is not on the ballot itself? What was the party distribution of the mistake? All voters are registered to a party or as independent. I’d feel better knowing more than one party was affected.
Just an observation… You sound reasonable. You have a reasonable questions. You are not accusing anyone of anything and you do not sound accusatory towards anyone – unlike almost every other comment here. The voice of reason, such a rarity these days.
I’m curious… who runs the board of elections?
Wow. Things were so much easier when it was paper ballots and day-of voting. None of these mail ballots and early voting nonsense.
You mean when there was 100 less million voters?
Except the hanging Chads.
I received 4 mail in ballots last time…Hummmmm…..all were in MY name.
Remember when you thought elections were legit? Good times.