- Tooele County voters received incorrect primary election ballots due to a print vendor error.
- Approximately 9,000 voters were affected; new ballots will be mailed at vendor's expense.
- County Clerk Tracy Shaw anticipated corrected ballots will reissued by Monday, June 8.
TOOELE — Just weeks ahead of Utah's primary election, voters in Tooele County were notified of incorrect ballots mailed to their homes.
Tooele County Clerk Tracy Shaw said approximately 9,000 voters were identified as having received the incorrect ballots, due to an error by their print vendor while ballots were in production.
"Our print vendor experienced the data-matching error that resulted in a limited number of voters being sent to the incorrect ballots," she told KSL. "The data we provided was fine, everything was good with the state system, it's just something on their production side."
The county clerk alerted the public in a Facebook post on Tuesday, saying her office received reports of voters getting the wrong ballots in the mail and were working to examine the issue.
"Be advised that we're hearing reports of incorrect ballots being sent to voters (ie GOP voters receiving the Non partisan ballot and some vice versa)," the initial post reads.
Shaw said one of the first calls her office received about the issue was from one of the candidates running in the primary election.
"He and his family members opened up their ballot to vote, and his name wasn't there, and so that made it pretty apparent to him that there was probably something weird going on," she said. "So he called our office immediately to ask questions, and that was the first we heard of it. So we immediately started doing our own little investigation to see, hey, what happened, you know, like how could this have happened?"
Shaw said "mass spoiling" — or deactivation of the incorrect ballots was taking place on Wednesday with help from Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson's office, and her office was working to notify impacted voters of the mishap.
New ballots will be generated and mailed at the print vendor's expense, once she examines re-extracted data that will go to production for reprinting and sent out to voters.
"I'm just being really careful with the data," Shaw said, "I'm fine tuning it; I obviously don't want to have more problems, so I'm being extra careful in scrutinizing the data before we send it over to them."
She anticipates the corrected ballots will be mailed out by Monday, June 8, at the latest.
With the primary election coming up on June 23, Shaw said she's happy to have systems in place to catch and correct errors.
"I'm not a fan of machines doing this type of work — I think it's important that we have people in these positions to complete this really important task. But people make mistakes, and I feel like you know if there needs to be some grace for that kind of thing, provided we have ways to correct them, and we do and I feel very confident in the system that we have," she said.
