The Erie County Election office is working hard to fix a duplicate mail ballot problem that Erie News Now first reported on Tuesday night.
The problem for nearly 300 voters was was caused by the county's ballot vendor, Election IQ based in Akron, Ohio.
It's causing a real headache for the Erie County election office, but officials there say efforts to address is are working.
Election workers tackling the issue by calling and mailing the affected voters who received a second ballot, and asking them to bring them in to the voter office. They are also using their high tech sorting machine that's now programmed to catch and isolate any of the duplicates ballots that may be returned.
Calling them duplicates may be a little deceiving.
Retired Erie Attorney Frank Kroto and his wife are among those who received a second set of ballots after their votes were already cast.
Election workers showed Frank that although the outer envelopes were addressed to the Krotos, the inner envelopes and ballots were really for different voters in Erie County, and that likely also means a different ballot inside based on the second individual's address and voting precinct.
So contacting those voters to make them aware is one step in the process. But the other guarantee that the mistakes are being caught is the use of that scanning machine It processes and photographs every outer envelope of a returned ballot.
The machine is now programmed to find those rogue extra ballots, if they're returned, so that only one vote for each registered voter will count. Tonia Fernandez, Erie County Director of Elections said, "If two get returned for one voter we'll look at that voter's information on their voter registration maybe look at their signature and then the signature supplied on the envelope and if we need to we'll contact those voters."
Election workers report that some callers and visitors to the voter office who have encountered these double ballot problems have been angry.
County election officials themselves are not happy with the vendor issue, but say they are determined to do everything thing they can to make it a clean election, so that every vote counts. "Everybody wants this to go well, everybody's very committed to doing a good job here," said Karen Chillcott, Erie County Clerk of Elections, adding, "So although this wasn't our error, we're working very hard to correct it, so if everybody would just have a little patience with our staff, we're working very hard to correct that."
Erie County has used the Akron, Ohio based vendor Election IQ since March of 2023. Chillcott said in three prior elections there were none of these problems. We asked if county election officials may consider filing suit or requesting reimbursement for the difficulty this has caused Erie County election workers. She said, "I mean we really haven't discussed that yet, that is something that we need to consider."