Some Weber County voters received duplicate ballots, but clerk says count will remain accurate

OGDEN — A small number of voters in Weber County were mailed duplicate ballots this month due to an equipment error with the printer, according to the county clerk.

Weber County Clerk/Auditor Ricky Hatch said his office caught five duplicate ballots after being notified by a voter who said they received two ballots in their envelope. Up to 167 envelopes were mistakenly filled with two ballots, Hatch said, though he's unsure of the exact number of voters who actually received duplicates.

"We don't have the exact numbers. The printer wasn't able to give that to me," he said. "We talked with the printer. They explained the situation, and we have controls on our end to help ensure that if a voter were to return both ballots, that would be caught and would not count two ballots."

When ballots are printed, a machine automatically grabs each ballot and inserts it into an envelope to be mailed to voters, according to Hatch. With the 167 ballots in question, an error led the machine to place two ballots in each, and the printer failed to catch the mistake before they were sent out. That error impacted only about 0.1% of all ballots in the county, according to the clerk.

"I suspect the number is far below 100, probably even into the couple of dozen range," he added.

Hatch said he's confident that none of the ballots will be counted twice, thanks to several layers of safeguards in place.

First, each ballot is run through a machine that tests for thickness, then three election workers watch as the envelope is opened and the ballot is removed to be counted. Finally, the office reconciles the total number of ballots counted in each batch with the number of vote histories recorded. If the numbers match, it means each voter who cast a ballot had their vote counted once.

"I'm not worried about a duplicate vote getting past those," Hatch said. "There's always a risk, but we have three levels of controls on our side, both technological and human-based, and I'm very confident that our workers and our processes will catch any duplicate votes that are cast."

Hatch said of the five envelopes returned with duplicates, two were caught by the thickness detector, while the remaining three were identified by election workers as they opened the ballots. None of those five duplicates were counted.

"In every election, problems happen. Usually, there are small problems like this, and the good thing is we know in advance, early enough before Election Day, that we can go back and fix these," he added. "In this case, we can capture and identify any potential duplicate ballots ... then we just keep moving forward."

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