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Ballot confusion produces frustration

Wrong ballots raise election process concerns in county

Jill Schramm/MDN Ward County Auditor Marisa Haman shows a ballot envelope to Ward County Canvassing Board member Kirby Thames at the canvassing meeting June 24.

Warren Smith of Halliday missed the opportunity to vote in his district’s legislative races June 11 due to a ballot error he believes was avoidable.

“You go to vote and you assume you’re going to get the right ballot,” said Smith, who failed to realize he had the wrong ballot before casting his vote. “It doesn’t seem to make any difference in the outcome, but it’s still not right.”

The concern about voters receiving wrong ballots also was raised June 24 by members of the Ward County Canvassing Board, who attributed errors in part to the switch from precincts to vote centers. Election workers putting in long hours and dealing with rushes of voters are having to manage what can be a confusing process of multiple ballot types.

Elections Director Erika White with the North Dakota Secretary of State’s Office acknowledged the challenges.

“With the number of ballots that election workers and county’s election boards are dealing with at any given time, there definitely is that human element that a voter could receive a wrong ballot,” she said. “Election boards are trained by each county extensively to ensure the voter is receiving the correct ballot. With that, counties are instructed to have clear ballot names.”

She said county auditor’s offices, when labeling ballots, can nickname them to more easily distinguish them from each other and mitigate human error.

White said a three-pronged approach is necessary to prevent wrong ballots. It consists of training county election staff, training poll workers and empowering voters to be aware of what their ballot should look like. Voters can obtain sample ballots in advance of an election so they know what their ballot should contain.

“If a voter does see something where they might think they received the wrong ballot, we definitely want to empower the voter to talk to the election board or the election workers in the county and get that rectified before they would cast a vote. Once a ballot is cast, there is no retrieving it,” White said.

Wrong ballots are not common, according to White.

“We see an instance or two of it in every election, but it’s not a widespread issue. The majority of the time voters are receiving the correct ballot,” White said, adding that no errors is the goal. “Nobody is happy when mistakes happen. We fine tune our training, and every election we learn something new and we figure out ways to make the process better.”

However, Greg Demme, who served on the Ward County Canvassing Board, said wrong ballots may be more common than thought.

“We’ve heard lots of people – this is all anecdotal, obviously – but a lot of people explaining that they’ve realized after the fact that they had wrong ballots,” Demme said. He said he and his wife were given wrong ballots when they went to the early voting center in Minot to vote in the recent primary. They caught the error and exchanged the ballots for correct ones.

Demme said election officials could do more to educate voters on how to obtain sample ballots online so they can identify when a poll ballot is wrong.

Other suggestions of the Ward County Canvassing Board to reduce errors included numbering rather than naming ballots, which some counties already do, and requiring two poll workers to be engaged in a ballot’s distribution to a voter to establish that second set of eyes. It also was suggested that only one of the county’s polling places serve as a vote center at which any county voter can cast a ballot. Ward County had nine polling places on June 11 and all were vote centers.

All the solutions have trade-offs, Demme said. For instance, a single vote center is a trade-off that sacrifices convenience, he said.

Smith said his wrong ballot appeared to have stemmed from a misunderstanding in his county auditor’s office when a school district change occurred. He explained he and neighbors living in legislative District 26 were mistakenly considered to be in legislative District 39 after their residences came into the Richardton School District upon the dissolution of the Halliday School District. Richardton School District was entirely in District 36 or 39 before the school district reorganization, he said.

“They just assumed that since we were in Richardton, we were in District 39 instead of looking at the map,” Smith said. “They just made the assumption, didn’t check it out.”

He also noted the closeness of the election in which he and his neighbors should have voted.

In the District 26 Republican House primary race, results showed first-term Rep. Jeremy Olson of Arnegard with a 170-vote margin over Roger Maki of Watford City, who held a 13-vote margin over first-term Rep. Kelby Timmons of Watford City.

Smith said the ballot mistake was the second he has encountered in recent elections. Previously, he and his wife realized the poll worker handed them incorrect ballots after partially filling them out.

“She gave us ballots for two different precincts and neither one of them were ours,” he said.

Mike Blessum of Minot, a poll worker in 2022, said he also has concerns about the number of ballot styles poll workers are faced with at vote centers. In testimony he presented to the 2023 Legislature on an election-related bill, he stated, “Because all eligible electors in the county could vote at any of the polling places, we had more than 40 different ballot types in the June election and more than 20 in November. As a judge, I matched the paper slip printed from the poll book to the ballot type for each elector based on the ballot code in June and the ballot name in November. I’d like to think of myself as a relatively competent person, but I know that I personally handed at least two incorrect ballots to electors in those elections because the voters brought them back to me.”

During that election, Rep. Jeff Hoverson, R-Minot, won reelection by eight votes in District 3.

“Regardless of whether the outcome of the election is impacted, every elector deserves to have their vote counted accurately,” Blessum said.

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