Several people express concern over numerous high-profile incidents of erroneous blank absentee ballots obtained by voters. Some of them claim defective mail-in ballots could mix up. Will it affect the presidential election this year?

This year, mail-in ballots are under heightened pressure when electors submit them in record numbers in the wake of the coronavirus's pandemic and President Donald Trump launches unfounded criticism against the mechanism.

Errors do arise every election. However, experts claim that there should be ample time to fix it before the upcoming U.S. elections. The issue dispersed undertakings involve hundreds of thousands and numerous contractors of election employees.

Doug Jones, a University of Iowa election technology expert, said suppliers configured several voting machines for the wrong precinct in a typical election year.

"As voters shift to voting by mail, the equivalent error is a batch of ballots mailed out with the wrong ballot style," Doug told the Associated Press.

Ballot suppliers, election leaders, and security analysts claim these concerns are happening with a certain regularity. They do not refer to theft, they claim, but also to human error.

What is happening?

In late September, nearly 100,000 absentee ballots with the incorrect names and addresses written on the return envelopes were sent to voters in Brooklyn, N.Y. Voters who sued erroneous mail-in ballots worry that the machines won't count their votes.

The election board of the city criticized the ballot-printer, Phoenix Graphics of Rochester, N.Y. It claimed that various counties experienced mechanical-inserting issues.

 

And this week, an undetermined amount of voters in Franklin City, home to Ohio's capital got the wrong absentee ballots. Around 2,100 voters in Los Angeles received mailed ballots that skipping the presidential election. Almost 7,000 voters in Teaneck, New Jersey had mailed ballots for the wrong Congressional race.

Officials from Franklin County did not clarify. Although a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles elections blamed an unidentified printing mistake. The official did not specify who did the printing. Teaneck claimed that it was to blame for a programming mistake from an independent provider.

Why is it like that?

Amber McReynolds, former Denver election chief, said states with fewer mail-in voting history may experience those mistakes.

Mail-in ballots could get stuck and return envelopes if voters insert the paper with older devices. Before these ballots get shipped out by auditing a certain percentage, suppliers could already detect the mistakes. Younger "intelligent inserters" are less susceptible to errors.

"It's (typically) an operator making a mistake and just not turning something on, as simple as that sounds," says the Phoenix-based Runbeck Election Services, a major ballot printer. Jeff Ellington, the company president, said the voters may experience the most complicated part of vote-by-mail, which is the insertion process.

In a reaction to a request for clarification, the firm who inserted the ballot in Franklin County, Bluecrest Inc., did not answer. The county said in a statement that "a high-speed scanner used to monitor ballots for consistency [failed to operate] correctly."

Will this render it less reliable for postal voting than in-person voting?

Certainly not, the practitioners claim. Grab the snag for Los Angeles County. County election spokeswoman Mike Sanchez said suppliers already sent corrected ballots to the concerned elector.

Jones, a researcher at the University of Iowa, warn that failure of elections could happen. The propensity of certain elected officials to rely heavily on outside vendors. Hence, he worries about outsourcing mail-in and in-person voting process.

He said they will "lose transparency and accountability" when they outsource.

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