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Voter confidence shaken after vote-by-mail flubs

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(The Center Square) – Voters are expressing a distrust in the election process, specifically when it comes to vote-by-mail ballots.

A mistake in Cook County resulted in a Libertarian candidate’s bubble, which is to be printed next to the candidate’s name, not being printed on vote-by-mail ballots.

Libertarian Party of Chicago Chairman Jim Humay said a voter reached out and informed the party the fill-in bubble was missing next to the name of Clerk of Circuit Court candidate Michael Murphy.

“Without the bubble, the scanner would not recognize any votes cast for our candidate. The clerk’s office looked into the matter and they said it was a ‘printing error’ on one set of ballots that was sent to a specific precinct and they were going to resend [vote-by-mail] ballots with an explanation of the printing error,” said Humay.

Humay said there should be some sort of quality control process in place and he said the party feels there needs to be reform, which is why they’re running a candidate against the incumbent clerk.

“Otherwise you’re disenfranchising voters not having [a quality-control process],” said Humay. “Voters can’t vote for the candidates that they want.”

Cook County spokesperson Sally Daly said the mistake was less than 300 ballots out of the overall total of 167,000 mail ballots that have been distributed to voters by the Clerk’s Office.

“It was confined to a single precinct in Northfield Township and corrected mail ballots were distributed to those voters,” said Daly.

In McLean County, a mistake has led voters to question whether their vote-by-mail ballots will count this election.

A third party company, Modern Litho, was hired to mail out and track vote-by-mail ballots for McLean County. The company sent about 180 vote-by-mail ballots with an envelope that had a Monroe County Clerk Office’s return address printed on it. Several voters notified McLean County GOP Chair Dennis Grundler of the mistake.

“I started getting texts from voters saying, ‘Something’s wrong. Our ballots have a return address to Monroe County. Are our votes going to count?,’” said Grundler. “I contacted [McLean County Clerk] Kathy Michael and she explained the third party company they hired somehow put the wrong return address envelope with their mail-in ballots.”

According to Michael, Modern Litho called and/or mailed all affected voters and the company sent out corrected return envelopes. Michael said that most voters received corrected envelopes within one day.

“As of today, we know of only one ballot sent to Monroe County and we were notified immediately. If any ballots did go to Monroe, they cannot be processed/counted on their equipment nor in their database,” Michael told The Center Square.

Grundler said he wished he had heard of the “abnormality” from the clerk before the voters because then he would have been equipped to answer all the voters’ concerns right away.

“Your mind just starts to wander when you see abnormalities,” said Grundler.

Modern Litho confirmed they send all the vote-by-mail ballots on behalf of McLean County and that they perform all quality control on those.

“This was a situation due to human error,” said Jerry Kiske, an account executive with Modern Litho.

Separately, Kiske also admitted to a vote-by-mail printing error in swing state Nevada. Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar shared during a forum that Modern Litho sent him a letter taking responsibility.

The Illinois State Board of Elections spokesman said in Illinois, all voting including vote-by-mail, is conducted by local election authorities.

“They [local election authorities] are not required to report these kinds of mistakes to us, but they often consult us for our opinion on the best way to address them,” said Matt Dietrich, spokesman for the Illinois State Board of Elections.