Error sent wrong ballots to hundreds of Fresno County voters. Here’s how it happened
What began as a seemingly routine update of Fresno County’s voter registration database eventually resulted in almost 300 voters being sent incorrect vote-by-mail ballots after they were assigned into the wrong precincts for the Nov. 5 general election.
Fresno County Clerk/Registrar of Voters James Kus said the problem was first brought to his department’s attention by a voter on Nov. 19, two weeks after the election and two weeks before the results were certified.
“At that time, 11 voters had been identified as having received and voted the incorrect ballot,” Kus said this week.
The issue stems from work in September to identify voters’ addresses with precinct errors and fix the precinct assignment. But, in the process, the update generated 259 addresses countywide that were incorrectly updated. Of those, 116 were coded into an incorrect voter registration precinct but still received the correct ballot because the precinct error did not affect the district races for which they would be voting.
But the remaining 143 addresses included a total of 295 voters who voted on incorrect ballots in districts where they do not live, Kus reported.
Fresno County has 511,349 registered voters, of whom almost 331,000 cast ballots for the Nov. 5 election.
Kus said the ballots cast by the 295 voters who received incorrect ballots “cannot be identified and removed or replaced.” That’s because voting in California is by secret ballot. While voters are required to sign the outside of their ballot-return envelope, “once a vote-by-mail ballot envelope has been opened and once the ballot has been removed for counting, it is not possible to trace that vote-by-mail ballot to any particular envelope,” Kus said.
The addresses affected by the erroneous update were spread across Fresno County, and a review of the problems found no contest from the Nov. 5 election in which the outcome could be affected voters who cast incorrect ballots.
Kus said the problem was due to human errors affecting the voter-registration database, and not with the county’s voting systems. The elections staff members involved in the incorrect update will be subjected to “corrective action including, but not limited to, retraining and reassigning” the staffers, Kus said.
The address update that caused the wrong ballots to be sent to the affected addresses was the second significant problem associated with the Nov. 5 election.
On Oct. 24, election workers collecting ballots from secured drop-off boxes in Fresno mistakenly left a key in the lock of a box at Fancher Creek Elementary School in southeast Fresno. A member of the public found the key in the lock and turned it in at the school office. Officials at the school then notified the elections office.
When workers went to the school to retrieve the key, the box contained about 50 ballot envelopes, none of which appeared to have been tampered with, Kus said. The box was quickly replaced, and the two-person team tasked with collecting ballots from drop-off boxes were taken off that job. Both were among 60 to 70 “extra help” workers hired through the county’s human-resources process to augment the Elections Division staff of about 30 people for the election season.
One was reassigned to other duties in the department, while the other opted to step away from the job rather than be reassigned.
This story was originally published December 12, 2024 at 7:34 AM.
