A state senator from Utah County spent much of Election Day trying to sort out a problem with early-voting ballots. It seems the Utah County Clerk’s Office mistakenly mailed duplicate ballots to a number of registered voters, raising questions about how the early-voting process was being managed and how to prevent multiple votes from one person. Sen. Curt Bramble on Tuesday evening told the Daily Herald that duplicate ballots had been mailed through a private fulfillment company using mailing lists provided by the county. Each ballot had a unique serial number, which means that each was legal tender for voting purposes. That raises the question of control. Were any safeguards in place to prevent someone from voting twice?
As of Tuesday night, that was an open question. Apparently, the duplicate ballots also included the voter’s unique voter identification number. Assuming the county database is set up to verify each ballot by that number, the possibility of fraud seems minimal. Was this a problem introduced by the third-party mail house? Or had the Utah County Clerk’s Office failed to provide a clean electronic list of voters in the first place — one that had been purged of duplicates? Bramble said the answer was not yet clear. “Ultimately, I don’t think there was any fraud,” he said. “But it raises the question of who has responsibility for safeguarding the integrity of elections.”
Full Article: Ballot boo-boo and other notes.