As state and local elections are set to conclude on Election Day next month, election integrity issues have already begun with absentee ballots.
Counties across the country have already run into problems with absentee ballots for local November elections, as Republicans such as former President Donald Trump and U.S. Senate candidate for Arizona, Kari Lake, have repeatedly criticized issues with absentee ballots.
In California, around 7,500 voters in San Diego County received duplicate ballots for the Nov. 7 special elections, including for the Board of Supervisors District 4 and the city of Chula Vista.
Voters there who were affected have been told that they can vote with either ballot and to destroy the ballot that they don’t cast.
While one of the two series of ballot packets has been suspended in the computer system, meaning that any suspended ballots cast will be automatically set aside, if a voter casts the suspended ballot only, then that ballot will be counted.
In Pennsylvania’s Lancaster County, absentee ballots were sent out with incorrect information for returning them for the municipal election on Nov. 7. The instructions for the ballots told voters to return their absentee ballots by inserting them in the white secrecy envelope rather than the yellow envelope. Ballots that aren’t placed in the yellow envelope won’t be counted.
For the primary election in April, Lancaster County sent out nearly 19,000 ballots that incorrectly instructed voters to only vote for one candidate in a race when they were supposed to vote for two.