According to a new report from Breitbart, California’s Riverside County announced Monday it had sent our 5,000 duplicate absentee ballots to residents in error. The county claimed none of them would count if voters attempted to vote twice.
Riverside County Registrar of Voters Rebecca Spencer claimed in a statement, “It is important to note that none of the duplicate ballots will result in a voter being able to cast more than one ballot,” adding, “I take election integrity seriously and apologize for the inconvenience.”
The county’s press release noted, “Each vote-by-mail envelope has a bar code. When the bar code is scanned as accepted at the Registrar of Voters office it automatically locks the voter’s record so that the voter can only vote once. If a voter who received two ballots returned both ballots, only one ballot would count. The first ballot received would be processed and the second ballot would be automatically voided.”
Breitbart adds:
The county said voters who received a second ballot should destroy it, and submit only one ballot before Election Day, November 8.
Prior to 2,000, voters in California who wished to vote by mail would have to request to do so. During the pandemic, the state began sending vote-by-mail ballots automatically to all voters on the rolls. As a result, some people reported receiving ballots for people who no longer lived at the address recorded on the rolls, or for people who had already died.
Voters are required to sign their ballot envelopes when voting by mail; signatures are compared to those on the voter rolls, but “[e]xact matches are not required” by law.
The county added in its press release, “The computer system error is resolved and procedures have been put in place to prevent the error in the future.. Voters with questions or concerns regarding their ballot are asked to call the Riverside County Registrar of Voters at (951) 486-7200.”