Almost 100,000 voters in Brooklyn will receive new ballots after a vendor sent return envelopes with the wrong name, address, and voter ID on them, the New York City Board of Elections said on Tuesday.
Elections board spokeswoman Valerie Vazquez-Diaz said the vendor, which prints ballots for Brooklyn and Queens, mistakenly printed the wrong information on "oath envelopes" that were sent to 99,477 voters, CNN reported Tuesday. This comes during a record-breaking year for mail-in ballot requests due to health concerns surrounding the coronavirus pandemic, magnifying some voters' concerns over fraudulent or erroneous voting.
One Brooklyn voter told CNN he fears the mistake could lead to somebody else casting a vote in his name.
"Presumably, someone out there has an envelope with my name on it, and if they don’t read the ballot as closely as I did, they could cast a vote in my name," Anders Kapur said.
Absentee voters in New York are required to enclose their ballots within an "oath envelope," which includes the voter’s name, address, and voter ID, before mailing them back to be counted. CNN said it was unclear if any of the ballots or envelopes had been returned to the elections board.
This is the second time New York City's board of elections has flubbed mail-in voting in Brooklyn. One in four ballots cast for one Brooklyn primary in June were found to be invalid.
CNN has more examples of ballot errors:
A similar printing issue affected over 6,100 voters in a northwestern county in Michigan. Newaygo County Clerk Jason Vanderstelt explained in a letter on Monday that absentee ballots sent out left out a key judicial race, prompting new ballots to be printed. Vanderstelt said he was first notified of the issue over the weekend with new ballots set to arrive on Thursday.
"Upon arrival of these new ballots, our clerks will be diligently working to reissue new Absent Voter ballots to all voters who have already been sent a ballot," read Vanderstelt's letter.
Vanderstelt noted in his letter that the county has procedures in place that will ensure only one ballot for each voter will be counted.
Meanwhile, printing errors in Virginia led to 1,400 absentee voters receiving duplicate ballots, according to The Washington Post. Election officials in Fairfax and Henrico counties blamed the error on the high demand of absentee ballots amid health concerns over in-person voting at polling locations. The officials told the Post, though voters received two ballots only one is counted per voter.
