The Orange County Canvassing Board on Monday acknowledged a printing error affecting about 1% of ballots for the Aug. 18 primary and agreed to meet again on Tuesday morning to begin fixing the problem.
The error resulted in 7,442 mail-in ballots being sent to voters in mid-July that erroneously listed Stephanie Murphy’s name ahead of Tiffany Moore Russell in the county mayor race. The affected ballots also swapped the order of candidates in the clerk of courts race.
Those transpositions mean that, if those misprinted ballots were used, the tabulation machines would not count those votes correctly.
The county Supervisor of Elections Office first learned of the error last Wednesday, according to a press release it sent out on Friday afternoon. Staff said they have notified all candidates in the affected races.
County staff said they believe the problem was caused by the printing vendor producing copies of a draft version of the ballot, rather than the final, approved version that was and will be used for 99% of primary ballots.
In all, the printing error has affected only about one percent of all ballots printed for the primary. The county says it has accounted for all affected ballots.
“The fact is, our processes worked,” said Eddie Ayala, the chief of staff for the supervisor’s office. “We have accounted for 100% of the impacted ballots, and we will account for every impacted ballot returned to our office. Voters' choices will be counted as they intended. The secrecy of the ballots will be protected, and every step of this process will be open to the public.”
Candidate concerns
Rick Singh, a Democratic candidate for Orange County Clerk of Courts, sent a six-page “formal request for investigation and evidence preservation” to members of the canvassing board on Sunday afternoon, posing 63 questions about how the error arose and how the county planned to fix it.
Singh attended Monday’s canvassing board meeting to voice his concerns that the error could have real consequences for the election results.
The board acknowledged that candidate order can have a minor effect on voting: the “primacy effect” can give the first candidate listed in a race a slight advantage of 2-3% in races with a wide field of candidates.
But because the error only affected the order of the second and third candidates in those races, the board said it wasn’t as concerned about whether it could change the outcome of either of those races.
“Frankly, I don't envision a circuit court judge would find a meritorious argument to be generated from that,” said Nicholas Shannin, an attorney with the Supervisor of Elections Office. “It doesn't change the fact that we are addressing this with the utmost seriousness and the utmost diligence.”
A solution
To rectify the problem, the county will duplicate each ballot — publicly, anonymously and under supervision of canvass board members — onto the correct ballots, which then will be tabulated as usual. (The county is using serial numbers from the vendor to identify the ballots that were part of the defective batch.)
It’s basically the same process it uses to count ballots that cannot be read correctly by the machines, staff explained — for example, if a bubble wasn’t fully marked before submission.
The board will follow “one additional step” during the duplication, Ayala said. “To provide greater transparency for this process, impacted candidates and their designees, and political parties and committees will be invited to observe the ballot duplication process at the duplication tables, in addition to viewing the process from the public viewing screens.”
The board will oversee elections staff as they begin hand-duplicating the ballots at 9 a.m. Tuesday morning at the county’s main elections office at 119 W. Kaley St. in Orlando.
