A Pennsylvania vote-by-mail ballot envelope (Capital-Star photo by Peter Hall)
This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.
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A handful of Pennsylvania counties mistakenly issued duplicate mail ballots to a few of their voters in recent weeks.
Why that happened is unclear — state and county officials gave different explanations — but they cautioned that the error would have not resulted in anyone being able to have their vote counted twice.
State and county officials said they have found that a total of 68 potential duplicate mail ballots were mistakenly issued. In some of these cases, they said, the ballots may not have reached voters, as the mistake may have been caught after a second ballot label was generated but before a duplicate ballot was actually mailed to the voter.
In Luzerne County, in northeast Pennsylvania, 31 voters received duplicate mail ballots, WVIA reported Tuesday. State officials initially said that the problem was isolated to that one county, but acknowledged a small number of other counties experienced similar issues — although potentially for different reasons — after inquiries from Votebeat and Spotlight PA.
Using publicly available information on mail ballot requests, Votebeat and Spotlight PA identified a few other counties that appeared to have issued duplicate ballots. Election officials in Dauphin, Montgomery, and Carbon counties confirmed that some voters in their counties had been issued or received duplicate mail ballots as well.
Emily Cook, election director for Luzerne County, told WVIA that the cause was an unknown problem with the state election management system, known as SURE.
But Jonathan Marks, deputy secretary of the commonwealth, said the duplicate labels were created in a variety of ways, and at least some stemmed from user error as counties tried to fix an issue with the first mail ballot. SURE’s user interface has shortcomings, he acknowledged, and resolving one issue can create another if counties don’t use the ideal method. Marks said the state is looking at how to improve it.
The Department of State said counties sometimes print duplicate labels for other reasons, such as damage to the original label. “A duplicate label’s existence does not automatically mean an error has occurred,” the department said in a statement.
Both county and state officials stressed that the duplicate ballots have been canceled, and could not be cast or counted. In addition, each ballot return envelope has a unique barcode associated with the voter. When a county receives a ballot back, the code is scanned into the SURE system and it marks the voter as having voted. If a second barcode tied to the same voter were to be scanned, the system would reject the ballot.
After learning of the duplicate mail ballots in Luzerne, state election officials audited the SURE system to check for any additional duplicates, and found 37 potential cases across seven other counties.
In Dauphin County, which includes Harrisburg, Election Director Chris Spackman said the county was informed by the department on Tuesday that “a routine internal review of the SURE system” had discovered a single duplicate ballot sent to a Dauphin voter. Spackman added that his deputy was informed by a contractor who helps the department manage the SURE system that the error was the contractor’s, but he knew no other details.
Megan Alt, a spokesperson for Montgomery County, west of Philadelphia, said the county had notified the state Wednesday morning of a potential duplicate, and workers subsequently discovered three other voters who had received duplicate ballots “as a result of files received from the state’s system.”
Carbon County’s election director, Jennifer Ketchledge, confirmed that her county issued 20 duplicate labels for mail voters. She said the department reached out to her Tuesday and informed her, and the county canceled the additional ballots.
“I have no clue” why it happened, she said, adding that the state was looking into it.
Even if two mailing labels for ballots are generated for the same voter, Ketchledge said the vendor that handles the county’s mail ballot printing and shipping would catch it before the duplicate ballot was actually sent.
Cook, the Luzerne election director, did not respond to a request for comment, but county officials told other news outlets the SURE system shouldn’t allow such errors to happen.
“Assuming that the state’s excuse is accurate, how broken is the SURE system if it cannot safeguard against a county inadvertently sending two labels for the same voter?” Luzerne County Manager Romilda Crocamo told The Citizen’s Voice Wednesday.
“There is nothing sure about the SURE system,” Crocamo added. “The upgrades to SURE system can’t happen soon enough.”
The state said the SURE system’s primary safeguard “is a mechanism that prevents recording more than one ballot per voter in a single election.”
Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.
Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization covering local election integrity and voting access. Sign up for their newsletters here.
