photo by: Nick Krug

Local residents fill out advance ballots on Monday, Sept. 6, 2017 at the Douglas County Courthouse.

TOPEKA – A Lawrence voter said she had to cast a provisional ballot when she tried to cast an advance ballot because her name had been mistakenly deleted from the voter registration list.

State officials later said the deletion was the result of a clerical error.

Jennifer Tucker, 40, said she has been consistently registered to vote in Lawrence since 1996 and has been a regular voter throughout that time. She even voted in the Aug. 7 primary.

But when she got to the Douglas County Courthouse on Friday to cast an advance ballot, she said she was told that her registration was deleted on Oct. 12.

“As someone who takes my civic duty very seriously, I am upset,” Tucker said in an email to the Journal-World. “It took 5 people trying to look up my information to figure out what happened.”

What happened, it turns out, is that another person named Jennifer, with a different last name but the same date of birth, recently moved from Lawrence to Ellsworth County and registered to vote there.

Ellsworth County Clerk Shelly Vopat said in an interview that when her office entered that person’s information into the statewide voter database, the system automatically flagged Tucker’s registration as a possible match, and a clerk in her office mistakenly confirmed it as a match, thereby deleting Tucker’s Douglas County registration.

Bryan Caskey, who heads the elections division of the Kansas secretary of state’s office, called it an honest mistake.

“Someone clicked on a match when they shouldn’t have,” he said in an interview.

Before noon on Friday, Caskey said, Douglas County officials had already updated her registration, and he said her vote would be counted on Election Day.

He also said most states operate with similar voter registration databases and that mistakes like the one Tucker encountered are not uncommon. He also said they are errors that are easily fixed.

However, “easily fixed” may not be the words Tucker would use.

“I’m fortunate in that I had the time to stand there and wait for the provisional, fill out the extra paperwork and generally spend the extra time necessary to figure out what had happened. If I had been at the polling place, without access to the computer system, I don’t have any confidence that they would have been able to figure out where the error occurred,” she said in the email to the Journal-World.