Election officials gave the wrong ballot to dozens of voters in a South Georgia school board race in November, requiring a third election for the same seat after previous errors during the initial election last summer.
A judge ordered the new election for Ben Hill County Board of Education this week because the race was left off the ballot for 88 voters. The race was decided by just 29 votes.
The election mistakes are the latest example of mismanagement invalidating voters’ choices and fostering distrust in results. In a race for the state House of Representatives, a judge is considering whether to order a new election in a rural east Georgia district after about 60 voters were likely assigned to the wrong district.
After last May’s school board election in Ben Hill County, a judge threw out the results because 26 voters who live on the same street were given ballots for the wrong district. Then in the second election in November, election officials inadvertently excluded eligible voters when they updated registration records before Election Day.
“How does this keep happening?” asked Kenneth Palmer, the incumbent school board member who won his case seeking the new election. “I’m hoping they’re going through and checking their process to make sure that for everyone who desires to cast a vote, their vote is counted correctly.”
Palmer, a counselor for the Georgia Department of Corrections, received the most votes during the first election last May, when he appeared to defeat real estate agent Austin Futch by 17 votes out of 217 cast.
Credit: Contributed
Credit: Contributed
In the November redo, Futch received more votes than Palmer, edging the incumbent 265-236.
Credit: Contributed
Credit: Contributed
“We have now had two elections in which the people of Ben Hill County have not been heard,” Futch said. “The first time, I was perfectly willing to attribute that to an accident. The second time, we have to start wondering if it’s negligence or lack of capability.”
Superior Court Judge John Pridgen’s order for a new election attributed the problem to an analyst for the secretary of state’s office who reviewed voter registration records the weekend before the election.
Both candidates said the Ben Hill County elections office is ultimately responsible for ensuring voters receive the correct ballots.
Ben Hill Elections Supervisor Rachel Roberts declined to explain what went wrong and referred questions to the county attorney, Nicholas Kinsley, who didn’t respond to emails seeking comment.
“I’m not certain (what happened),” Roberts told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “I just know we have to rerun it.”
The error occurred because of an “unprecedented and complicated situation” when preparing for the redo election in November, said Mike Hassinger, a spokesperson for the secretary of state’s office.
When a judge ordered the new election, he required that only voters who were registered by April 22 were eligible to participate in November. As a result, election officials had to program voting computers with different registration deadlines for the presidential election and for the school board race.
But then those updates to registration records were accidentally overwritten before Election Day. As a result, only 31 out of 119 Election Day voters in Board of Education District 6 received ballots that included the school board race.
No other races on the November ballot were affected by the mistake.
“Errors due to improper districting are rare, but unfortunate, and this office remains committed to catching and correcting them for every election,” Hassinger said.
The third school board election is scheduled for March 18.
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