John Matthews
WMAL.com
ROCKVILLE — (WMAL) With record crowds turning out to vote early for the November 8th election, Montgomery County’s 10 Early Voting Centers – and the volunteer judges who run them – have been kept busy.
So busy, in fact, that some errors have been popping up that are, at least in a small way, altering the voting in congressional races.
Each Early Voting Center is equipped with paper ballots for all three Congressional districts in the county, and there have been reports of some voters receiving the ballot for a Congressional District where they don’t live.
“When I was given a ballot to vote, I went over to the voting booth to mark it up, and when I got to the race for Congress, I saw that one of my choices was John Sarbanes,” said Adam Pagnucco, who writes for the political blog, Seventh State. “Well, I don’t live in John Sarbanes’ district – I live in Jamie Raskin’s,” he explained.
Pagnucco caught the error, returned his ballot and was given another ballot to complete. When he shared his story on Facebook, he says he immediately heard from three people who had similar stories to tell.
“What bothers me about this is that had my incorrect ballot gone into the scanner, there would have been no way to track the mistake. They would not have known that I was not eligible to vote for John Sarbanes.”
The Montgomery County Board of Elections confirms that, in fact, some accidental incorrect voting has taken place, and there’s no way to fix it after the fact. However, spokeswoman Marjorie Roher insists the problems have been scattered and extremely limited.
“We have received a few reports of this. Most have indicated that the voter actually realized that they had the wrong ballot, and we were able to reissue them the correct ballot,” she told WMAL.
Roher says the County election manager has been in contact with the Early Voting Centers to make sure the volunteer election judges know to double and triple check which ballots they are handing out.
“The other thing we did was that we reviewed the layout of the ballot issuance tables, and made some modifications to make sure that none of the ballot styles were being commingled – another safeguard to try and keep this from happening,” said Roher.
State election law requires voting centers to carry all of the ballots for each Congressional District, so that voters can go to the center of their choice in their home counties. In Frederick County, there’s a safeguard in place to keep voters from using the wrong ballot.
“Before the voter even enters the booth, there’s a second check,” says Election Manager Stuart Harvey. “Obviously, there’s the check at the table when they’re issued the ballot, and then the voting unit judge double-checks it before the voter goes into the voting booth to make sure they got the right ballot style.”
Pagnucco told WMAL he feels the problem in Montgomery is fixable, and said it needs to be fixed by the next election cycle in 2018, when not only Congress, but the County Council and State Assembly races are also up for grabs.
A fix should be in place by then. Roher says the State Board of Elections is currently working on a new optical-scanned ballot for 2018 that will get rid of preprinted paper ballots altogether.
For now, Montgomery promises to work on eliminating human errors on its end – and asks for voters to do the same, using the sample ballots that were mailed to them weeks before voting began.
“There’s also a responsibility for voters to make sure that they know before they go to vote who they want to vote for,” said Roher.
Copyright 2016 by WMAL.com. All Rights Reserved. (PHOTO: Sarah Hoye/CNN)
