Thousands of Wayne County voters to get new ballots after printing error

Filed 1h ago · Via Michigan Advance · The Buffoon Desk

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Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: Rijksmuseum · CC0 · via Wikimedia Commons

At least 8,500 Wayne County, Michigan voters are getting replacement mail ballots after a candidate running for a partial term on the Belleville library board was printed in the wrong section. Belleville, Sumpter Township, and Van Buren Township had already mailed the originals before county officials caught the error and notified the communities on Sept. 28.

The verification document meant to catch such mistakes before printing contained the same error, so the usual safeguard didn't help. Officials say voters who return the faulty ballot won't be penalized; their selections will be copied by hand onto a corrected ballot, and Wayne County has agreed to cover the cost of reprinting while it's still unclear who pays for the extra labor.

Officials are advising affected voters to shred the original once the replacement arrives and not to vote both; similar ballot reprints happened in Dearborn last year after a candidate who had dropped out still appeared on the ballot.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

A single misfiled library board candidate turned into eight thousand five hundred envelopes nobody can use, and the backup copy meant to catch exactly this kind of mistake had the same typo baked in. That is like proofreading your grocery list against a copy you wrote while half asleep. The clerks handling the cleanup seem to be doing the patient, unglamorous work right, which is more than you can say for whoever signed off on the first print run.

Source: Read the original at Michigan Advance → Scored: Sneaky · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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