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At least 8,500 voters in Wayne County are getting new mail ballots after officials misprinted their originals.
Belleville, Sumpter Township, and Van Buren Township all sent their ballots out last week, but a county error meant that a candidate running for a partial term on the Belleville Area District Library Board was included in the section for full-term candidates instead.
Wayne County officials noticed the problem earlier this week and notified the affected communities on Sept. 28. New ballots are in the works, but Van Buren Township Deputy Clerk Brittany Beaudry said she didn’t expect to have them before Monday.
Once they arrive, she plans to bring in people who normally work as poll workers to mark the envelopes so voters can distinguish the replacement ballot from the original and return the correct one.
“Everything had gone really smoothly,” Beaudry said Thursday. “I was commenting on it, like, ‘This is great! It went out a day early!’ The process went really well until it didn’t.”
It’s not yet clear who might pay for the additional work needed to get corrected ballots out, Beaudry said. Wayne County has agreed to pay for envelopes and ballots and offered its staff to help, though, she said.
Typically, counties design ballots and send them to cities and townships to review for spelling and accuracy. The system helps catch problems before counties send the ballots to the printers.
In this case, though, Belleville Interim Clerk Michelle Bellingham said that the documents officials received to check the ballot against also had the error.
“We had no way to know,” Bellingham said.
Beaudry estimated that Van Buren Township will have to resend roughly 7,700 ballots. In Belleville, Bellingham estimated it would be just over 800. Sumpter Township officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but state records from the August primary show that 1,824 people requested absentee ballots there.
Those who return the ballot with the error will not be penalized in any way, officials confirmed. Ballots with the faulty race will be duplicated upon receipt — that is, officials will copy the voter’s selections by hand onto a new ballot to ensure it can be tabulated correctly. A voter’s individual selections are not tied to their name or ID, meaning their privacy is maintained even if their ballot needs to be duplicated.
Beaudry said that, depending on the number of faulty ballots received, she may have officials call voters before envelopes are opened and ask if they would like to fill out a new one instead.
“We don’t want to be duplicating ballots for days after the election,” she said.
Dorian Tyus, a spokesperson for the Wayne County clerk’s office, confirmed Thursday that no other offices or proposals were affected.
“In the coming days, affected voters will receive a letter and a new absentee ballot from their local municipal clerk with detailed instructions on how to vote their replacement ballot,” he wrote in an email.
Voters will not be allowed to vote using both ballots. Those who received a ballot with the error are advised to shred it and wait for the new one to arrive.
Ballot errors are rare, but they do happen. Last year, Dearborn had to reprint about 10,000 ballots after the original absentee ballot listed a candidate who had dropped out of a race months prior.
The error, as in the Dearborn case, is usually caught in time to get new ballots printed.
Hayley Harding is a reporter for Votebeat based in Michigan. Contact Hayley at hharding@votebeat.org.
