Human errors can affect all elections
Last week, Monmouth County, New Jersey election officials discovered a voting machine error with the November 2022 general election vote tabulations that caused 6 districts to have votes double counted. Officials say that one election could potentially be affected. In Ocean Township, the original tally of votes for the Board of Education election was extremely close, with Steve Clayton defeating Jeffrey Weinstein by only 20 votes and filling the third open seat up for election.
The votes were uploaded twice from a USB flash drive by a technician. Usually, voting machine software prevents this from happening and notifies officials at the time an error occurs. However, due to a human error of software reinstallment in July, the duplication was not detected at the time of the error. Monmouth County officials are calling for a recount in Ocean Township to determine whether Clayton or Weinstein is the true winner.
Similarly, an error occurred in a school board RCV race in Oakland, California during the 2022 general election. A human error caused the voting machine to incorrectly count ballots. Election administrators should have programmed vote-counting software to advance ballots to the next ranking when a candidate was selected for a particular round. For example, if no candidate was selected as a first-choice, the machine would count the second ranking as the first ranking and so on. However, during the election, if a ballot did not identify a valid candidate in a particular rank, then no vote was registered for those ballots. In the initial count, Nick Resnick narrowly led Mike Hutchinson by just 41 votes, which changed after 250 were re-tabulated. Mike Hutchinson, who originally placed third, has now been named winner of the race.
Last month, FairVote released a statement in response to the Oakland race. Again, we stand firm in our statement that fixable voting errors, human or not, benefit from accountability and transparency measures. They are a natural, unintended consequence of human errors, not unique to ranked choice voting.
Riverside, Merced, and Tulare counties in California experienced ballot errors. Riverside County voters received two mail-in ballots for the general election in November due to a computer system error, which was caught after 5,000 of those duplicate ballots were already mailed. Riverside County Election officials ensured these duplicate ballots would not in fact lead to a person being able to vote twice since every ballot uses unique barcodes and the computer system prevents additional votes being cast in that person’s name.
Mapping issues following redistricting in Merced County caused incorrect or missing local races to be included on mail-in ballots. Merced County officials sent out corrected ballots to the voters who were impacted. Similarly, Tulare County voters received incorrect ballots for their voting district following a geographical error with the Election Office’s mapping system. New ballots were issued to voters almost immediately. These errors are opportunities for election administrators and vendors to develop and implement additional best practices for future elections.
It is vital for voters to trust in our election system, and the transparency of the Monmouth County and Alameda County election officials on the errors in these two school board races should be applauded, even as we learn from mistakes. Openness to our mistakes reinforces our democratic processes, whether the elections use ranked choice voting, single-choice voting, or any other voting method.
