A mistake on an absentee ballot itself, such as filling out bubbles improperly or voting for too many candidates in a contest will not be detected until the ballot is tabulated, because Absentee by Mail ballot return envelopes remain unopened and sealed until tabulation. Depending on when the ballot is returned and the volume of Absentee by Mail ballots received in a particular election, this can happen in a meeting prior to an election, on Election Day, or after Election Day.
Regardless of when the ballot is run, the voter corresponding to that ballot will be unlikely to be present. Rather than individually contacting each voter to redo their ballot (which is not permitted for mistakes on a ballot itself), what happens in this case is the following:
- The DS850 Central Count Tabulator cannot read a ballot.
- If it is determined there is a deficiency with the ballot or it will not read after multiple attempts, it is brought to the Board of Elections for analysis.
- At this point the situation branches:
- If the ballot is determined to have a contest or contests in which the voter voted for too many candidates and it CANNOT be reasonably determined which of the chosen candidates is the one they would have preferred to vote for, the ballot is run again under different settings in order to count the contests that are properly voted and cancel those that are not.
- If the ballot is determined to have a contest or contests in which the voter voted for too many candidates and it CAN be reasonably determined which of the chosen candidates is the one they would have preferred to vote for (i.e. they voted for four Board of Education members but crossed one bubble out), the ballot is duplicated with the voter’s correctly deduced intent and the duplicated ballot is cast as their ballot.
- If the ballot is determined to have a deficiency resulting from misprinting or damage such that the machine will never be able to properly determine votes from it, but the voter’s intent can still be determined, the ballot is duplicated according to voter intent and the duplicated ballot is cast as their ballot.
Ballot duplication is the structured process of officially recreating the ballot of a voter who is not present during ballot tabulation.
Ballot duplication is only performed by a bipartisan team (one Democrat and one Republican) during an open Board of Elections Absentee meeting. Ballot duplication is never performed at polling places, Early Voting sites, or anywhere else absent a quorum of actual appointed Board of Elections members. Ballot duplication occurs according to the following procedure:
- One of the two individuals involved takes the original ballot stamped ‘Original’, the other takes a blank ballot stamped ‘Duplicate Ballot’
- The individual with the original ballot reads the voter’s selections from that ballot out loud, contest by contest
- The individual with the blank ballot records what the other individual reads aloud, contest by contest
- When the duplicate ballot is complete, the individuals swap ballots and ensure that the correct votes were read or recorded, respectively, by the other.
- If this process is done by a bipartisan team that does not consist of two Board of Elections members, two Board of Elections members of opposite parties also verify that the correct selections were made.
The above processes apply specifically to Alamance County, but can be generalized to any other county depending on type of central count tabulator is used and the sheer volume of ballots. For legal guidance on determining voter intent on ballots when they are not present, see Numbered Memo 2020-32 (4).
