The Duval County Supervisor of Elections Office is using a new vendor for ballot printing this election, and some of those ballots are slightly larger than the specs that allow them to be read by machines at polling locations. WOKV first received reports from some voters, who said their ballots were not being read by the machines, and instead the ballots were being collected by poll workers. Duval Chief Elections Officer Robert Phillips confirms to WOKV that some ballots were printed with a very slight variance from the specs, meaning they are too wide for many of the machines at the polling locations to accept. By Tuesday night, Phillips told WOKV that around 1,700 ballots could not be scanned, across 45 precincts. It appears to be mostly non-partisan ballots having this problem, although there have been some partisan ballots that did not fit as well.
The precincts have a procedure in place for situations like this, and Phillips says everyone followed the process.
If a ballot is not accepted by the machine, it is collected in an “emergency compartment”, which is not touched until the end of today. Once polls close, the poll workers attempt to run the ballots through the machines at the precincts again. If they are still not accepted, the ballots are put in an “unscanned bag”, which is then taken to the Elections office at One Imeson.