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