Trending
YOUNGSTOWN -- The Mahoning County Board of Elections mailed about 20,000 absentee ballots with incorrect instructions telling voters to sign their ballots when returning them.
The instructions that were sent with those ballots stated: "You MUST sign your name in ink on your ballot."
It left off two important words at the end: "identification envelope."
"It was a formatting error," said Tom McCabe, the board's director. "The problem happened on our end. The insert should have included the full sentence. It won't mess with the counting of the ballots. We want to make sure about the privacy of ballots."
It's a certainty that some people have signed their ballots because of the erroneous instructions, McCabe said, even though there is no place on the document for their signatures.
Voters are required to sign the envelopes in which they place the ballots that are returned to the board of elections, McCabe said. Those envelopes include instructions regarding signatures as well as a place to sign them, he said.
The board learned of the error Monday after getting a number of calls from voters about the issue, McCabe said. All absentee ballot requests since then have the correct instructions, he said.
But about 20,000 absentee ballots -- likely an overwhelming majority of those that will be sent out by the elections board -- were mailed between Oct. 12 and 14, he said.
Oct. 12 was the first day the board could mail absentee ballots so any requests made before then -- and through Oct. 14 -- were sent to voters with the incorrect instructions, McCabe said.
"We've gotten back a few thousand absentee ballots already and so far, all of the envelopes have been signed," McCabe said.
What isn't known is how many voters also signed the ballots in compliance with the insert that was mailed with their absentee requests, he said.
"We got ballots signed in the past" without the inclusion of the incorrect instructions, McCabe said. "No votes are affected by this. There's no place to sign on the ballot. But we've gotten signed ballots before and we'll definitely get them now."
dskolnick@vindy.com