Some voters in Montgomery County’s 8th Congressional District got a surprise when their sample ballots arrived in the mail recently. Above their address was someone else’s name.
Liz Allen, of Bethesda, Maryland, was among the voters who received an incorrectly labeled ballot. She said it was alarming at first.
“I was thinking, ‘Oh, what if I go vote with my driver’s license and they don’t have my name at this address,’” said Allen.
Montgomery County’s Board of Elections said it recently sent out 132,217 sample ballots to voters in the district which encompasses a large portion of Montgomery County from the D.C. border up through Damascus.
Allen called the Montgomery County Board of Elections and was told she wasn’t the only person notifying them of errors with their sample ballot.
Gilberto Zelaya, with the county’s BOE, said those calls tipped them off to an issue with sample ballot and voter information packet sent to voters whose last names start with “A” or “B.”
“Then, as we looked and got into the weeds, we saw that it was the spreadsheet used to print the name and addresses on the sample ballot,” Zelaya said.
He said the error in the spreadsheet that was used by the company which prints the ballots led to a “limited number” of ballots arriving with the wrong names on them. Zelaya said the spreadsheet was corrected and replacement sample ballots will be sent out soon.
“We’re going to reprint those. We’re going to send them out. But all the information on what the voter received is fine. It’s current,” Zelaya said.
When asked if the spreadsheet error, if unaddressed, would lead to a printing error for the official ballots later this year, Zelaya said the answer is no.
“Those are two separate systems,” he said.
Zelaya said it’s unclear how many voters were impacted. All voters in the district were emailed digital versions of their sample ballots after the error was discovered.
The BOE said it also noted an error with the early voting dates on the sample ballots printed in Spanish. Early voting will take place from Thursday, Oct. 24, through Thursday, Oct. 31.
For Allen, she said the name mix-ups have been the talk of the neighborhood listserv, but she is glad the issue is being addressed and that the error won’t impact official ballots.
“Especially at this election time, I think it’s important that special attention is brought, that everything’s looking good,” she said.
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