Voting fiasco as thousands of duplicate ballots sent to Californians

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Thousands of California voters were sent duplicate mail-in ballots ahead of the midterms as questions swirl over the security of the state’s election process.

The error occurred when a printing company that has handled Tulare County‘s ballots for years mistakenly doubled up, confusing the nearly 8,000 voters who received the forms.

About 3% of the county’s 227,000 registered voters were affected. In the Republican-leaning city of Tulare, which has just over 34,500 registered voters, roughly 23% received duplicate ballots.

The confusion spilled into the registrar’s office in Visalia last week, when residents called and showed up in person, worried they could be accused of attempting to vote twice.

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His wife and son also received duplicate ballots, he said.

County Registrar of Voters Chief Clerk Michelle Baldwin said the printer, Porterville-based ProVote Solutions, had accepted full responsibility for the mistake, while maintaining that safeguards were in place to prevent the extra ballots from being counted.

“Accidents do happen,” David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research and a former Justice Department voting enforcement attorney, told the Los Angeles Times.

“Our elections are incredibly decentralized, run by hundreds of thousands of human beings. As a result, we know there is going to be human error, but our elections are not designed to be perfect. That’s impossible.”