COLUMBUS – Nearly 50,000 Franklin County voters who were sent incorrect absentee ballots in the mail this week can expect replacements in the next few days.
UPDATE 10/9/20 2:53 p.m.: The 46,669 ballots containing erroneous information were among the 237,948 mailed by the Franklin County Board of Elections during the first week of early voting for the Nov. 3 general election.
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Corrected replacement ballots will be mailed to those voters along with postcards containing information about their options within 72 hours, according to a release from the board Friday afternoon.
In the meantime, voters can check the status of their ballot at the board’s website or cast ballots in person at the board’s early-voting center at 1700 Morse Road.
Secretary of State Frank LaRose said Friday that the election board made “a serious mistake” but that the county was working hard to fix it.
Shortly before 2:30 p.m. on Oct. 2, before more than 237,000 requested absentee ballots were mailed out, someone changed a setting on a machine that places the ballots into envelopes. Some ballots had an incorrect congressional race. Others had the correct information but were sent to voters in a different precinct.
The board staffers assigned to work on the scanning machine have all been assigned login identifications so it is expected that officials will determine who changed the setting.
“We have no indication or belief that anything nefarious was done,” deputy director David Payne said during a Thursday afternoon news conference.
Voters may be nervous because of election year rhetoric from both political parties that have criticized aspects of the electoral process.
Election board director Ed Leonard and other officials, including Gov. Mike DeWine, hurried to reassure voters Thursday that there was nothing wrong with the state’s system of conducting the Nov. 3 general election.
“Let me assure you: no vote will be counted twice and every voter will receive an accurate ballot,” Leonard told reporters at a briefing.
“Our system works,” DeWine told reporters at his regular press briefing Thursday. “That doesn’t mean that there can’t be a problem, but our system works, and it works very well, and I think people should have confidence in it.”
A private vendor said unusually high requests will delay the mailing more than 1 million absentee ballots until Monday.
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The pingpong game in the courts over a one-per-county limit on the number of ballot drop boxes in the presidential battleground of Ohio has turned back in the Republicans’ favor with a decision in a federal appellate court.
A three-judge panel of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday approved Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose’s request to put on hold a lower federal judge’s decision to block his directive.
With his order once again intact, LaRose can proceed with an appeal of a U.S. district judge’s decision that limiting drop boxes impeded the the constitutional right of voting.