PD Editorial: Ballot snafus risk fueling election conspiracy theories

After ballot blunders in Mendocino County and elsewhere, election officials need to exercise greater care printing and distributing ballots to voters. When elections officials make mistakes, they damage the credibility of the electoral process and fuel conspiracy theories.

Mendocino County bumbled twice preparing for the March 5 election. The county right now is investigating reports that some voters received information for the wrong voting districts, possibly because details of a 2021 redistricting were entered incorrectly in voter files.

That problem came after the county earlier this month mailed Republican ballots for the 1st Supervisorial District to voters countywide. After learning about the mistake, the county quickly distributed new ballots to 53,000 voters, but the extra ballots are in the wild. Election skeptics no doubt will pounce if someone submits two.

Officials traced the missent ballots to a third-party vendor, Integrated Voting Systems. The company apparently sent ballots based on a test image, forcing the county to rush to fix the error.

This isn’t Integrated Voting System’s first ballot snafu. Fresno County opted not to extend a contract with the company last fall because of what one supervisor called “a spotty record.”

In 2016, California barred a company with a similar name, Integrated Voting Solutions, from doing business in the state after a bankruptcy filing. It quickly reappeared under a new name, with the same address and last names of executives, and successfully registered with the California secretary of state.

The company had problems beyond California, too. In Colorado, it printed incorrect ballots in 2018. In Utah, it printed ballots without a required signature line in 2020. The mistakes led some counties to switch to different vendors.

Not that private contractors are the only ones making ballot mistakes. In January, California Secretary of State Shirey Weber’s team bungled the designation that was supposed to accompany Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Christina Pascucci’s name on the March 5 ballot. Officials blamed “an internal miscommunication.”

Another recent error occurred locally. In 2022, Sonoma County had to reissue ballots to 770 voters because of a failure to update boundaries changed during redistricting.

We all make mistakes, of course, but there’s no margin for error in the high-stakes business of running elections, especially when both partisan Democrats and Republicans are aggressively looking for evidence that the other party is corrupting the process. Erroneous ballots and other errors, even if corrected, give them ammunition.

In Mendocino County, officials have promised a thorough audit of their process and a renewed commitment to accuracy. “We want to assure voters that they will receive and get the proper ballots and that every vote will be properly counted,” the county’s chief executive officer, Darcie Antle, said.

The Secretary of State’s Office should play a central role in that audit to ensure its independence. The county, meanwhile, needs to reexamine its relationship with Integrated Voting Systems and consider finding a more reliable vendor.

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