The Bladen County Board of Elections replicated more than two dozen early-voting ballots on Saturday due to a poll worker’s mistake, officials said.
When eligible voters arrive at a voting site and show their photo ID, they receive an authorization-to-vote form. Poll workers are supposed to scan a barcode at the top of the form to print each voter’s ballot.
But a poll worker at the Bladenboro early-voting site didn’t scan the barcode on 29 ballots, Bladen County Director of Elections James Nance III told Border Belt Independent. Instead, the worker used a computer to print the ballots, which designated the wrong voting precinct.
“It’s an administrative error,” board chair Larry Hammond said during a meeting on Saturday. “No votes are changed.”
During the nearly five-hour meeting, two-person teams of poll workers—one Democrat and one Republican—copied 27 voters’ selections onto new ballots with the correct precinct, Nance said.
But two voters received ballots that also had the wrong district, meaning they voted in the incorrect races for the county Board of Commissioners and school board.
Election officials contacted the two voters to encourage them to cast corrected provisional ballots, Hammond said. As of Saturday, he said, one voter had done so. He said the other couldn’t be reached before the meeting, so a bipartisan team replicated the voter’s ballot but skipped the affected local races.
Poll workers also re-fed into voting machines every ballot cast at the Bladenboro site during the 17-day early voting period, including those cast Saturday.
The early-voting location’s chief judge realized the poll worker’s mistake on October 20, according to Hammond. Nance said he called the N.C. Board of Elections right away, and state election officials who went to Bladen County helped determine that the ballots had to be replicated.
Hammond said poll workers will undergo “enhanced training” for next year’s municipal elections.
A new election director will oversee the contests, as Nance resigned during the board’s October 20 meeting, effective November 28.