The vendor used by the Maryland State Board of Elections mailed duplicate ballots for the upcoming primary elections to 791 voters in Montgomery County. As confirmed by Dr. Gilberto Zelaya, election officials learned of the error on June 30 and a letter was sent to the recipients on July 1 containing an explanation of the error and instructions on what to do next. In the letter, recipients were instructed to destroy the second ballot if they had already returned a voted ballot or if they still had both.
“We recently learned that you received a second ballot in the mail. Our vendor inadvertently made this error, and it is isolated to a small group of voters in Montgomery County.”, the letter read. “Please know that we have procedures in place to make sure that one, and only one, ballot gets counted for each voter. If you already returned both ballots, only one ballot will be counted.”
The problems continued however. On July 5, election officials learned that more duplicate ballots had been mailed to 142 voters across Maryland including 11 in Montgomery county. Another letter was sent to the recipients yesterday with the Maryland State Board of Elections stating, “We are working with the vendor to ensure that this does not happen again.”
According to the May Monthly Statistical Report by the Montgomery County Board of Elections, there are 674,603 active voters in Montgomery County meaning the error affects only .001% of registered voters. Early voting began Thursday with the last day to request an absentee ballot being July 12.
