Ada County had to reissue 7,000 ballots for May primary. Here’s how things went wrong
The Ada County Elections office prides itself on running smooth elections, Ada County Clerk Phil McGrane says.
Then Idaho’s primary election, set to be held May 19, was switched to an all-absentee election because of concerns over the potential to spread COVID-19 if an in-person election were held.
The change has been fraught with problems.
The primary election covers three of Idaho’s four congressional seats. Each of the 105 seats in the Idaho Legislature is also up this year, as are four offices in every county: commissioner districts one and two, prosecutor and sheriff.
On April 16, McGrane’s office reported problems with ballots already sent to voters in Boise’s 16th and 17th legislative districts. In District 16, which covers the Garden City area, one candidate was listed even though she had withdrawn from the race. In District 17, which covers much of the Boise Bench, the problem was with party listings — both a Democratic and Republican candidate appeared on the Democratic ballot, while neither appeared on the Republican one.
New ballots had to be reissued for more than 2,100 voters. McGrane chalked that error up to communication problems between his office and the Secretary of State’s.
The next day, McGrane sent another news release, saying processing constraints meant that there would be a delay in mailing all ballots. The county had received tens of thousands of ballot requests and had only a few people to handle them.
A week after that, yet another: Some unaffiliated voters across the county had received nonpartisan ballots when they had requested Democratic ones — an error that meant nearly 5,000 ballots had to be reissued.
McGrane blames the errors on three factors.
The first was an Idaho Secretary of State’s office decision to change to an absentee election just two days before federal law required the first ballots to go out. Absentee ballots are only available when requested and need to be mailed in or turned in at a dropbox outside the Ada County elections office.
Chad Houck, chief deputy secretary of state, told the Statesman in a phone interview that department officials had been working for weeks to make recommendations to Gov. Brad Little on how to potentially handle the pandemic’s effect on the primary. The decision came when it did, he said, because that was when the team making recommendations was able to secure the information it needed from epidemiologists to make a decision.
The second factor McGrane cited was that the state’s new online absentee ballot request form, introduced for the primary, which created a sudden, large volume of requests for ballots as the public learned from the news media that people would need to request their ballots. Houck said Ada County got hit especially hard as several Boise-area news outlets reported on the change.
The third factor was a delay in getting the actual requests to county clerks. Houck told the Statesman that when launching the online request form, officials decided that they would prefer to put the public-facing side that takes in requests before voters as soon as possible, even if the clerks’ offices wouldn’t be able to access those requests and process them yet.
That meant that by the time Ada County obtained access to its requests filed through the state form, the county had thousands already piling up.
The backlog put the county elections office under pressure. Ada County already runs the largest elections in the state — in November 2018, more than 31% of all votes cast in Idaho were cast in Ada County, according to data from the Idaho Secretary of State — and the influx of absentee ballot requests far exceeded what officials originally estimated for the state primary.
“It’s an unprecedented election on many levels,” McGrane told the Idaho Statesman by phone.
In states like Colorado, where elections are run entirely by mail, a huge number of mailed ballots is no issue — elections offices have special (and expensive) equipment to help handle them. In Idaho, where most people vote in person, the infrastructure to process large numbers of mailed ballots is not in place, McGrane said.
To deal with the influx, Ada County requested help from the Secretary of State’s Office to handle ballots in a large group rather than one-by-one. At times, the county was getting as many as 20 requests in a minute, Houck said, and humans working to process them could not keep up.
The Secretary of State’s Office worked with its vendor in charge of the ballots to come up with a solution: a script of digital instructions for repetitive tasks that would help expedite the process and get ballots out faster. Ada County was the only one wh
That script turned out to be oversimplified. It issued Democratic ballots to all Democrats, Republican ballots to all Republicans and nonpartisan ballots to all others, disregarding the choices voters indicated. Incorrect ballots made their way to voters, who flagged the problem, forcing the county to reissue ballots once again.
“We apologize to all of the voters who were impacted by this error,” a news release sent by the Ada County elections office said Monday.
McGrane said his office is committed to being transparent about what is happening.
“We want the candidates, the political parties, the voters, media all to be able to walk through and see, ‘Oh, here’s what happened, here’s the issue,’ which we’ve been quick to identify what those issues were,” McGrane said, “but also here’s how we’ve handled it along the way so that someone can follow our footsteps and see, ‘Oh, OK, that makes sense.’”
Richard Peebly, executive director of the Ada County Democrats, said the county party is not worried about the election. Ryan Davidson, chairman of the Ada County Republicans, said he too is confident in the election.
The staff at the elections office is working to match up ballots to ensure only one vote is counted per voter, he said, even if voters return multiple ballots. The team has more the doubled in size to process everything, even as they work to follow social distancing protocols — 10 full-time elections staff members are joined by 12 additional staff members from other parts of the clerk’s office. Two additional temporary employees have also been brought on.
McGrane said his office has had some major successes as well. He said the county was able to get peel-and-stick envelopes to cut down on the number of people licking envelopes that the elections staff has to later handle, and it was able to get prepaid postage on its return envelopes.
“For the most part, things have gone right, and we’ve been largely fortunate for the things that haven’t, because we have been able to quickly identify the problem and get a remedy in place,” he said. “We are able to get everybody the correct materials and make sure everyone has the opportunity to vote. I think that’s probably the biggest silver lining in the situation.”
Voters have until 8 p.m. on May 19 to request ballots, which must be received by June 2. Election results will be announced that night.
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