Some Erie County voters received multiple ballots. How election officials are handling it

(This story was updated to accurately reflect the most current information.)

Not only did the mail house that Erie County contracts with print nearly 300 duplicate ballots, it sent those ballots to the wrong voters.

The Erie County Board of Elections and the Voter Registration Office are working to contact 296 voters who received the duplicate ballots, notify them of the mistake and urge them to surrender the wrong ballot.

Erie County Clerk Karen Chillcott, who oversees the Voter Registration Office, said the county will thoroughly examine the ballots from the affected voters to make sure no one has voted on the wrong ballot or voted twice, which is illegal.

"If it looks like a different signature on it, we're going to take that information to the district attorney's office and that would be investigated. If somebody did vote twice purposely and intentionally voted somebody else's ballot, that'll be prosecuted."

One of the recipients of the two ballots notified the Erie County Voter Registration Office about the mishap on Friday. Chillcott said she waited to notify the public until the Akron, Ohio-based ElectionIQ could determine the scope of the problem.

What ballots did the 296 voters receive mistakenly?

The recipients of these ballots were sent two identical envelopes. One contains the proper ballot for their voting precinct with a return envelope that contains their name and address. The other envelope contains a ballot, in some cases for a different voting precinct, and a return envelope with another voter's name and return address. Both the voters whose ballots were printed twice and those who received it were provided with the correct ballot, Chillcott said.

The Voter Registration Office has programmed its electronic sorting machine so it segregates the affected ballots. Those ballots will be manually reviewed by a team of people to ensure no one has voted twice and, if they did, which ballot is legitimate and which one is not, according to Chillcott.

"We know where these were sent," she said. "We have a pretty elaborate spreadsheet of who got the ballots, who they were intended for, names and addresses, the voter correspondence ID for all of the parties affected. All of that's been programmed into our sorting machine."

Some recipients have discarded the ballots and others are being sent envelopes to return the wrong ballot and return envelope to the Board of Elections. Chillcott said other recipients can surrender the additional ballot to the office to help it reconcile all 296 duplicates sent.

How'd this ballot mailing issue happen?

Chillcott said ElectionIQ officials described the issue as a software failure.

"What happened was their software, they have an inserting component in that process where they insert that ballot into the outside envelope," Chillcott said. "There's four different pieces of software that run that equipment. The addressing component failed, so it crashed in the middle of the one run. When it started back up again, it didn't start where it left off. It picked up at another point in the file. Okay. That was a new issue. That was not a known issue for ElectionIQ. So the one part of the process kept going and the other one jumped ahead in the file (of voters whose ballots were being printed) when it picked back up."

Some 38,000 mail ballots have been requested so far for the Nov. 5 election. The deadline to request a mail ballot is Oct. 29.

The Board of Elections on Tuesday sent out a statement notifying the public of what occurred.

"The board is committed to the integrity of the upcoming general election and is confident that it has taken all steps necessary so that these duplicate ballots will not affect the outcome of the election in any way," the statement says.

Other voters still waiting for their mail-in ballots

Many voters who requested a mail ballot have still not received one, a problem that has also been blamed on ElectionIQ, which handles large batch mailings for the county.

In fact, the problem is not confined to Erie County. On the same day the Voter Registration Office learned about the duplicate ballots, officials in Mahoning County, Ohio, fired ElectionIQ for failing to send about half of the ballots voters there had requested, according to WKBN News.

Mahoning County Board of Elections Director Tom McCabe told the news outlet that it was the first such occurrence in his 26 years on the job. McCabe said ElectionIQ performed well in Ohio's March presidential primary and again in its June primary (for state and local races and issues), but not for the general election.

"They got a little too far behind," he told WKBN. "We lost a lot of confidence in them."

Chillcott said she has contacted the Pennsylvania Department of State to help the county resolve the issue with ElectionIQ.

"They've also contacted ElectionIQ on our behalf to get to the bottom of this," she said. "We want accurate, factual information from my ElectionIQ.

Chillcott said the problem is not with the Voter Registration Office, but members of the public have been calling county employees and harassing them, bringing some of them to tears.

"We're just as frustrated with the situation because we've been assured that all of the ballots were sent out," she said. "We had no reason to doubt that. We've used them for the last few elections and we've not had a problem like this."

Matthew Rink can be reached at [email protected] or on X at @ETNRink. 

This article originally appeared on Erie Times-News: Erie County election official: Vendor to blame for mail ballot issues