Keystone Today

City of Allentown issued the following announcement on Oct 14.

The Elections Division announced today that a ballot image mapping error by the company contracted to handle the printing, collating and mailing of ballots has resulted in 28,879 voters in Allegheny County receiving incorrect ballots. Those mailings are being corrected and new, correct ballots will be delivered to the post office beginning on Thursday, October 15 through Saturday, October 17. Most are expected to be delivered to voters the week of October 19.

The mailing by Midwest Direct is from a batch of 32,318 voters whose date of mailing shows in the state ballot tracker as September 28, 2020. There were no issues with the county data, but a ballot image mapping error by Midwest resulted in individual voter’s information being matched to the ballot for the next voter in that batch. 

On Friday, October 9, 2020, the Elections office received communications from approximately 20 county voters who received their mail-in or absentee ballot packets but found that they had been sent the wrong ballot. Division staff immediately reached out to Midwest Direct to suspend mailings and directed the company to begin investigating what occurred. As elections identified impacted voters, the ballots were reissued in-house, but no ballots were sent out after Friday.

Midwest Direct identified and corrected the issue yesterday, October 13, and began printing the correct ballots for voters. Moving forward, a printout of the first and last 10 records will be generated for every file showing which images are being used. That printout will be compared to the actual printed ballots before inserting to verify correct images have been pulled. A second data processor will also review the files to create a two-person check.

Beginning this morning, Elections Division staff is manually locating and segregating all ballots received from voters that were included in this batch. Those ballots will be set aside and reviewed as part of the Return Board process following the election. Only one ballot will be counted per voter.

The corrected, re-issued ballots will be identified on the envelope that the voter receives. Additionally, the declaration envelope will also have identification on it to indicate that it is the envelope that should be used to return the corrected ballot. Only one ballot will be counted for each voter.

Midwest Direct had 19,564 ballots that were set to be delivered to the post office when this error was first reported. That initial run has been destroyed and the ballots are being reprinted. The print will be verified and the ballot packets will be delivered on Wednesday and Thursday to the post office. The mailing includes those ballots showing in the state’s ballot tracker as having been mailed on October 3 and October 5, 2020. 

As an additional security measure, voters who are included in this batch of ballots will not be able to have a new ballot issued except through this mailing until October 26. Voters who have not received their corrected ballot by October 26 may go to the downtown office of the Elections Division, or contact the office, for a reissuance.

Within the next 24 hours, the Elections Division will have a search feature available on its webpage that will allow voters, using their name or voter ID number, to determine if they are part of the impacted batch. In the interim, voters may use the state’s online ballot tracker to look up when their ballot was mailed. It can be found in the column “Ballot Mailed On.” If the date is 09/28/2020, you may have received an incorrect ballot.

Voters may always view the sample ballot for their municipality, ward and district on the county’s webpage. If a voter is unsure of his or her municipality, ward and district, they can use the state’s “Find Voter Registration Status” tool. On the page, where the polling place address is listed, the municipality, ward and district are also found.

Original source can be found here.