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A western Pennsylvania county accidentally sent voters 157 duplicate ballots for the 2026 midterm elections.
The Department of State said “human error” resulted in some Westmoreland County residents who requested mail ballots getting multiple of them. The department gave assurances that only one ballot per voter would be counted.
“The statewide voter registration system has safeguards in place that will not allow more than one vote to be counted for a single voter, even if a voter sent back both ballots,” Geoff Morrow, a spokesperson for the department, said in an email.
When a county receives a mail ballot from a voter, the barcode on the exterior return envelope is scanned into the Statewide Uniform Registry of Electors, or SURE, database, and that voter is logged as having voted. If a county were to receive a second ballot return envelope from the same voter, the system would recognize the barcode on the second envelope as a duplicate and prevent it from being entered — and thus from being counted.
The department said Westmoreland County is the only county reported to be affected by the error.
As of Thursday, more than 35,000 voters in Westmoreland, a suburban county east of Pittsburgh, had requested mail ballots.
One resident who received a duplicate ballot, who asked not to be named but sent Votebeat and Spotlight PA photos of both ballots, said when they contacted the county elections office, they were told to just “rip up” one and throw it out.
Doug Chew, vice chair of the Westmoreland County Board of Commissioners, said the root cause of the issue was still being determined, but it started when a county employee encountered an error message sometime last week when trying to download new mail ballot requests from SURE to send them to the county’s mail vendor. The employee then called the Department of State’s SURE helpline to troubleshoot the issue.
“What we believe is there was either a mishearing or a misunderstanding between our person and the person on the helpline that created this issue, so to speak, where duplicates actually came out,” Chew said. He emphasized that the problem was not with the SURE system itself.
Chew also said that the county will be making poll workers aware of the issue in the event that voters who received duplicate ballots show up in person on Election Day. He said that if someone does try to return both ballots, the matter would be referred to the district attorney. From now on, the county will also check each new daily list of mail ballots it sends out against the master list of ballots already sent to ensure there are no new duplicates, Chew said.
The Westmoreland County incident is not the first time duplicate mail ballots have been sent to voters. In 2025, voters across four counties received duplicate ballots; some instances were chalked up to human errors, while officials in at least one county laid blame on the SURE system itself.
This is also not Westmoreland County’s first issue with mail ballots this fall. Earlier this week, the county reported there had been a delay in sending out nearly 30,000 ballots due to an issue with the county’s mail ballot vendor.
Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.
