Up to 157 incorrect ballots cast on first day of early voting, Cobb elections director says

May 10—MARIETTA — Up to 157 ballots were affected by an encoding error on the first day of early voting for the May 24 election, Cobb County Elections Director Janine Eveler said.

Eveler outlined the issue that led to some voters receiving incorrect ballots on May 2 at Monday's meeting of the Cobb Board of Elections and Registration.

Analysis by elections staff found that of the 1,995 ballots cast on May 2, a Monday, 546 were cast by voters in precincts affected by the issue, and 157 were cast before the problem was resolved later that morning.

The issue led to some voters receiving ballots that were missing an election they were eligible to vote in, or included an election they were ineligible to vote in.

Eveler said some voters raised the issue with a poll worker and were able to get a corrected ballot. Others decided to leave and come back once the problem was fixed. Some, however, ended up casting their ballot, or never even realized that their ballot was incorrect.

Ballots are anonymous, and once cast cannot be retrieved or altered. For people who cast incorrect ballots, it's too late.

"We can't unring the bell, and we can't go back in time," said Board Chair Tori Silas.

Implications

Elections staff were also able to determine the number of incorrect ballots for different elections. The most common problems were with state Senate districts, where 70 ballots had an incorrect district, and state House districts, where 89 ballots had an incorrect district.

Voters first noticed the issue when a cityhood referendum didn't appear on their ballot, despite living in the boundaries of one of the proposed new cities in Cobb.

"The proposed cityhood issues were so obvious that they became the talking point about the ballots and this problem, but it really was bigger than that," Eveler said.

Ten ballots were incorrectly missing the Lost Mountain cityhood question, while four ballots incorrectly included it. Another seven ballots included the East Cobb cityhood question when they should have instead had the Lost Mountain question.

Twenty-nine ballots were incorrectly missing the East Cobb question, and seven ballots incorrectly included it.

For the Vinings cityhood question, six ballots incorrectly included it.

There were also problems with U.S. congressional districts, school board races, county commission races, and a special election to fill Ward 2 of the Smyrna City Council.

Board member Steve Bruning asked Eveler about the legal implications of the errors. Lawsuits could be filed if there are close elections that were affected by the issue, Eveler told the board.

"Well, our attorney (board attorney Daniel White) didn't come today," Eveler said. "But in my experience, you would wait and see what the margins are after all voting has completed, and if the margin is within these numbers, then we'd probably have a challenge that a judge has to determine."

Technical difficulties

Before early voting began, Cobb elections staff provided an updated database of ballot combinations to the Georgia Secretary of State's office.

Because of differing district lines for different government bodies, there are many different versions of the ballot, based on which districts the voter lives in. Boundaries of proposed new cities further complicated combinations.

It was the state's responsibility to provide the updated database to the vendor that provides "poll pads" — tablets which poll workers use to encode plastic voting cards. The cards are then given to voters, who insert them into voting machines, pulling up their ballot.

On the first day of early voting, however, the new database had not been loaded onto the poll pads, causing some voters to receive incorrect ballots.

County staff sent the updated database to the state before voting started after discovering an earlier database did not include two ballot combinations.

Each voting combination, ordered alphabetically, has a corresponding code. When two new combinations were added to the database, all the combinations below them moved down the list, changing their code.

"What happened with this change is that we had inserted two different precinct combos that, again, were not found initially during redistricting. And we're late in the process, we didn't really have a lot of time to do quality assurance from the redistricting effort," Eveler said. "If we had had enough time, we believe we would have found those earlier in the process, and the database would have been created with that information to start with."

Eveler presented a timeline of the issue to the board, saying that voters and polls began calling to report the issue around 8-8:30 a.m. May 2. Staff identified the issue by 8:45 a.m. and provided instructions for workarounds shortly thereafter. Calls were made to each poll manager starting at about 9:30 a.m. All polls had been notified of the issue and given instructions by 10:35 a.m., Eveler said.

The encoding error wasn't the only problem during the first week of early voting, however. An unrelated issue occurred Thursday due to a statewide software outage for ElectioNet, a software used to sign in voters. That issue did not result in incorrect ballots, but did cause delays as poll workers were forced to use slower, more manual methods to check in voters.

In addition, one west Cobb voter told the MDJ last week that she received an incorrect ballot on Wednesday — Eveler said that if that occurred, it was an isolated case of human error from a poll worker selecting the wrong code.

No clear fix

The 1,995 ballots cast on May 2 are sealed and in their own container, Eveler said. Bruning proposed asking the state Elections Board for assistance to see if there is a legal way to correct the problem.

"I hear what you're saying," board member Jennifer Mosbacher said. "But there is no way to match a voter to a ballot ... Also, we don't know how many people may have actually gone to the poll manager and said, 'Hey, I don't have this on my ballot,' and actually gotten it re-coded. So, I think that the 157 max number gives us a really quantifiable amount to be looking at. So if we see that margin of discrepancy, or if a candidate sees that margin of discrepancy, then we have grounds to research further, or they have grounds to go to a judge..."

Mosbacher also noted that the Georgia Association of Voter Registration and Election Officials wrote to the state legislature asking them to delay the primary, but were not granted that request.

"I have to say, publicly that even though we said that this is a programming error from either the state or the vendor — which it is — but they were under just as much pressure in this short timeframe as we were," Eveler added. "And so we weren't able to fully test it, we didn't have enough time, we spot-checked it ... the vendor didn't have time to do all of what they needed to do ... Really, the root cause is just, the redistricting has put a time crunch on every single thing we do. And the primary is the most complex election that we do, and so it is always a challenge."

Whoever is to blame, that batch of incorrect ballots cannot be uncast.

"A vendor dropped the ball, or the secretary of state didn't advise the vendor, it doesn't matter what the actual chain of events was, but now we're stuck with it," Bruning said.

Added board member Pat Gartland, "what we end up saying is 'My bad,' that's it."

{p dir="ltr"}Cobb Countians cast more than 12,000 votes in the first week of early voting for the May 24 election.

{p dir="ltr"}The 12,172 votes cast from Monday through Saturday last week were disproportionately Republican — 7,350 Republican ballots were cast, 4,646 Democratic ballots were cast and 176 nonpartisan ballots were cast.

Cobb Elections has already issued 6,142 absentee ballots, 912 of which have been accepted.

In other business, the board voted unanimously to certify the election results of the May 3 District 45 state House special election runoff, in which Republican Mitchell Kaye defeated Democrat Dustin McCormick. Kaye will serve out the remainder of former state Rep. Matt Dollar's lame duck term, which runs until the end of 2022.