Weber County printer error puts two ballots in up to 167 mailers

Weber County mailed voting packets containing two ballots to as many as 167 residents due to a mechanical error at the county's contracted printer. Weber County Clerk Ricky Hatch confirmed the mistake occurred during the envelope stuffing process. He stated that a miscalibrated machine slipped duplicate ballots into the packages before they were sealed and mailed.

The discovery happened shortly after the ballots went out. A voter who found the extra ballot contacted the clerk's office to report the anomaly. Hatch said the printer acknowledged the fault. He quoted the vendor as saying the issue stemmed from a minute adjustment or setting on their equipment that could have been prevented. The vendor claimed this had not happened to them before.

The county can determine the maximum number of affected envelopes because the total number of printed ballots must match the number of registered voters. Hatch explained that if a ballot is damaged or if two are placed in one envelope, the final print run comes up short. In this case, the run was 167 ballots short. That number represents the absolute worst-case scenario for duplicate packets. Hatch suspects the actual number is well below 100, though he noted he has no data to back that estimate up.

The county mailed out 135,000 packets in total. Hatch described the impact as a minuscule percentage of the overall vote. He said the county aims for zero errors, but acknowledged that every election presents challenges. He characterized this specific error as a pretty small one in the grand scheme of the election process.

Voters do not need to return both ballots if they find them. Hatch advised that voters can simply ignore the duplicate. However, if a voter does mail in both, the county has systems in place to prevent double counting. The machines that process incoming mailers measure the thickness of each envelope. If an envelope is too thick, the machine flags it for staff inspection to check for duplicates.

If the automated systems miss the error, human oversight catches it. Teams of three employees manually open every ballot. They would notice if a second ballot is present inside the envelope. Hatch said this manual check provides a second layer of verification for the mail-in process.

A final check occurs during the ballot reconciliation process. The total count of ballots must match the number of envelopes received. If a discrepancy appears, staff use a labor-intensive method to match bar codes on the ballots and envelopes to identify the extra vote. So far, the county has processed 19,000 mail-in ballots. Staff found four envelopes with more than one ballot inside. In two of those cases, the extra ballot was blank. In the other two, the voter marked the duplicate ballot identically to the first.

This is not the only ballot mishap this cycle. Utah County clerk's office sent notices to more than 6,000 voters telling them they were first-time voters who needed to include a photocopy of identification. Many of those voters received the notices in error. They had either provided identification when registering or had voted previously, but a clerical error triggered the notification anyway.