photo by: Contributed

A postcard from the Douglas County election officer tells voters that they may have received two ballots by mistake for the November 2021 election.

Douglas County’s top election official has begun notifying about 1,200 county voters that they may have incorrectly received an extra ballot in the mail for the upcoming city and school board elections.

But Douglas County Clerk Jamie Shew said Wednesday that he’s confident the ballot mistake — caused by a third-party printing and mailing company — would not affect the operation of November’s local elections.

“I’m extremely confident,” Shew told the Journal-World. “Even if they receive two and return two, once the first one gets logged, there is no way for us to log the second one.”

The ballot mixup comes at a time when there is a national debate between Democrats and Republicans about how much vote-by-mail elections should be expanded. Opponents of expansion have expressed concern that mailed ballots are too susceptible to errors, while supporters argue the evidence does not back up concerns of voter fraud involving mail ballots.

“I’m not pleased this happened,” said Shew, who is an elected official and runs as a Democrat. “But we are able to say there are processes in place to stop (fraud) from happening.”

Shew is uncertain how many extra ballots were mailed to registered voters, but he said it is fewer than 1,200. In Kansas, no voter receives a ballot by mail unless they have specifically requested it for a particular election.

Shew’s office receives those requests multiple days per week, then sends a batch to a third-party printer that addresses, stuffs and mails the envelopes. On the day that the error occurred, the printer had received 1,200 names of advance voters to send ballots to.

The printing company started processing the list twice, but then recognized its error before the entire batch was double-mailed. But Shew said it was difficult to determine how much of the list had been double-mailed, so he decided to notify all 1,200 voters who were part of that day’s list. Every voter on the list received a postcard from the Douglas County Clerk’s Office explaining that they may have received two ballots and instructing them to destroy one of the ballots. Shew also reached out via a phone message and email message to every voter on the list who had provided his office with that contact information.

The voters on the list were a mix of party affiliations — it was not all Democrats or Republicans, for example — and they weren’t confined to any one city or geographic area of the county, Shew said. The list simply represented whoever had requested an advance ballot on that particular day.

Shew provided details to the Journal-World on several of the processes in place to prevent people from turning in two ballots during the election. He said the biggest factor is that advance ballots must be accompanied by an envelope that bears the name and signature of the voter.

As the clerk’s office receives advance ballots — either by mail or drop boxes — election workers check the signature on the envelope and enter the name of the voter into the system as having returned the ballot. Shew said the computer updates the database of received ballots instantaneously. If a second ballot arrives in an envelope with that person’s name on it, the election worker will receive a notification that the voter already has returned a ballot. At that point, election workers have strict orders that the ballot and envelope cannot be placed in the pile to be counted on election day. Rather, the clerk’s office will inquire why one voter returned two ballots, Shew said.

If a voter turns in an advance ballot without an official envelope, that ballot won’t be counted under any circumstances, Shew said. For example, if a voter discards the envelope the advance ballot is supposed to be placed in and simply sticks the ballot alone in a drop box, Shew said that advance ballot becomes uncountable.

“If it is just the ballot, we don’t count it,” Shew said. “We have no clue who it is, so we have to just set it aside and it is destroyed.”

Shew said his office also has protocols in place to protect against people arriving to vote in person and dropping an unauthorized ballot into the election day voting box.

“There are a lot of steps before a ballot gets counted, and we balance to the ballot,” Shew said. “I don’t say ‘we have 100 extra ballots than we have voters, and that is fine.'”

Shew said his office has engaged the third-party printer about the error and how it can be prevented.

“What happened is that at some point they started running the list again, and we have had long conversations about how that is not OK, and the internal controls that can be put in place to prevent that from happening again,” Shew said.

Voters in all four cities in Douglas County — Lawrence, Baldwin City, Eudora and Lecompton — are choosing city commissioners or council members in the upcoming election. In addition, school board elections are being held throughout the county. Advance voting is underway currently, and election day is Nov. 2.