Ballot-assignment error seen; mix-up affects voters in 3 precincts of Crawford County

Supporters of a candidate cavort across the street from a polling place in Little Rock's Hillcrest neighborhood Tuesday afternoon, March 3, 2020.  (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/John Sykes Jr.)
Supporters of a candidate cavort across the street from a polling place in Little Rock's Hillcrest neighborhood Tuesday afternoon, March 3, 2020. (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/John Sykes Jr.)

FORT SMITH -- Some voters received incorrect ballots for a number of electoral races in Crawford County this week, according to the county Election Commission.

Commission Chairman Bill Coleman said Thursday that the issue affected three precincts in the northern part of the county: Cedarville, Chester and Cove City. A vendor for the commission, the Omaha, Neb.-based Election Systems & Software, originally sent a list of precinct parts that was alphabetized. The commission then took those precinct parts and assigned to them the ballot that they were supposed to get.

"A different person up there called and they were going to send it back down again, and when they sent it that time, it was still alphabetized except ... what they did, they used abbreviations on there: CH for Chester, CO for Cove City and CV for Cedarville," Coleman said. "Well, that took Cedarville, instead of being ahead of Chester, it put it after Cove City."

This resulted in the assignment for the ballot that the precinct parts involved were supposed to get being incorrect, according to Coleman. It was Wednesday afternoon before any voter noticed that there was an issue.

The races that were affected include U.S. Congressional Districts 3 and 4, Arkansas House of Representatives District 80 and Crawford County Justice of the Peace District 1.

[RELATED: Full coverage of elections in Arkansas » arkansasonline.com/elections/]

"There were six to eight, and I think it's going to be six voters, who lived within Congressional District 3, House District 80, and JP District 1 that got a ballot outside of that and did not get to vote in those races," Coleman said. "Now, the other side of that was we had about 28 voters that lived outside of those districts and did get a ballot that had those names on it."

The commission does not know whether these 28 people voted for these candidates, although Coleman said they had that possibility. There were also 87 voters living within the city limits of Cedarville that did not get a city of Cedarville ballot. This means that these voters did not get the opportunity to vote on a deannexation issue that should have been on their ballot.

Coleman noted that it did not take very long for the commission to get the issue fixed after figuring out what it was. At this point in time, in consultation with the Arkansas secretary of state's office and the state Board of Election Commissioners, the county Election Commission has determined that it is going to leave everything as it is. All the ballots that have been cast during the early voting period up to Wednesday evening are sealed and in a secure location.

"... And then, they will be separate from all the rest of the early votes if we need them to be so that if we need to go through and try to pull out the votes that were cast by voters outside of those districts, if we have races that are really close or something and that would make a difference on those, then we can go back and manually go through the 5,000 or so early votes that we have and pull out those 28 and subtract them from the totals at the end of the day," Coleman said.

Coleman said the commission has not yet determined if there is anything it can do about those who voted and did not have something that they should have had, and it is still investigating this matter.

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