The Brown County Election Board publicly questioned every employee in the county clerk’s office last week, but did not immediately determine who was responsible for signing the initials of election board representatives onto absentee ballots, or how a voter ended up getting two ballots in the mail on the same day.
The board will meet again on June 4, two days after primary election day, to continue its inquiry.
These are not the only concerns voters and the clerk herself have raised about the way this election has gone so far.
With a new clerk and staff in the office, new voting equipment, new polling places, virus-related recommendations in place for voters and pollworkers, and unprecedented demand for mail-in ballots, this election also has been unlike any that’s ever happened before.
Between May 7 and May 29, the election board and this newspaper reported receiving at least seven messages from voters about various concerns with the balloting process.
Among them are another duplicate ballot instance besides the one the election board is currently investigating; a ballot from the opposite party being mailed to a voter instead of the one she requested; ballots being delivered to a post office box that was not the address a voter had put on her application; ballots folded in a way that could reveal voters’ choices when the ballots were opened; voters waiting weeks for a ballot to arrive in the mail; trouble returning a completed mail-in ballot by mail or in person; and election information postcards arriving at voters’ homes after the mail-in ballot application deadline listed on them had passed.
Brown County Clerk Kathy Smith, a Republican, placed some blame for these irregularities on the post office for not recognizing some pieces of mail as deadline-sensitive election mail, the secretary of state’s office which found and fixed a glitch in the online ballot request system a couple weeks ago, and unnamed staff members in the County Office Building who she said were accepting election-related mail for her office and shouldn’t have been.
When questioned by the election board, most of the clerk’s office staff members said they had received no training on the election and had nothing to do with it besides taking phone calls from people requesting mail-in ballot applications or counting ballots into stacks of 10.
“We’ve been really trying and trying to accommodate everyone through this whole mess. This election is totally crazy,” Smith told the board and the approximately three dozen people listening into the virtual election board meeting at noon May 27.
“We’ve had 1,321 people vote by mail. That’s an election in Brown County in itself. … Everybody has done their due diligence to do the best they can do, and I don’t think that anyone’s done anything maliciously. I believe it’s just things that happened.”
“… And I’m not the only county that had somebody get two ballots,” she added.
The investigation
The election board — Democrat Amy Kelso, Republican Mark Williams, and Smith as county clerk — opened an inquiry in early May about one instance of a voter receiving a duplicate ballot. That voter, an 84-year-old woman, received two envelopes containing a blank ballot in the mail on the same day, both postmarked May 2.
The voter returned one in the mail after voting on it and the election board collected the other unused ballot.
In the process of looking into how this happened, Williams found that the initials on one of those ballots — which were supposed to come from him and from Democrat proxy Michael Fulton — were not in his handwriting. Fulton reported the same thing, that that was not the way he writes his initials.
Williams laid out his “findings of fact” in a document that was read during the May 21 election board meeting. Smith did not attend. At the May 27 meeting, Williams questioned each staff member in the clerk’s office individually and under oath.
No one admitted to initialing the ballot to appear to look like Williams and Fulton initialed it, or to intialing any other ballots.
Williams, when questioning Smith, said that she’d mentioned to him earlier that maybe the ballot could have been marked during training. He asked what kind of training she gave the staff. Smith answered that she ended up not getting to do that training because of a time crunch and because of COVID-19, when many of her staff were not in the office.
The voter told the election board in a written statement that she had requested a mail-in ballot when she went into the clerk’s office one day to pay child support for a family member.
Smith told the board under oath that the voter had made one request for a ballot over the phone and then a second request online.
Williams asked each clerk’s office staff member about the process used to take and process requests for ballots, and also if they knew this voter and would recognize her in the clerk’s office if they saw her.
All staff members but one said that they didn’t know this voter and wouldn’t recognize her. Smith — who was one of the people who said she probably wouldn’t recognize the voter — said that to her knowledge, the voter did not come in to fill out a ballot application in person.
Child support payment records showed that the voter was in the office, Williams said.
Donna Lutes, who’s related to this voter, suggested that the election board do some further investigation because she was “getting aggravated” that people were questioning whether the voter was even in the office. Maybe they could pull the security tapes from the hallway to review, she said.
County human resources coordinator Melissa Stinson, who used to work at the clerk’s office, said that each clerk’s office staff member would have an ID under which to take child support payments, so that would identify who helped this voter and took her ballot request.
The election board was going to try to get that information before the June 4 meeting.
It’s still unclear how the voter was able to receive a second ballot in the mail. If a ballot is marked in error, lost or otherwise unable to be voted on, a voter is supposed to fill out an ABS-5 form before getting a new ballot.
None of the clerk’s office staff knew whether or not this voter received one of those forms. Most staff members, besides Smith and Deputy Clerk Laura Wert, said they didn’t know what an ABS-5 was.
The investigation isn’t closed, Kelso said. The election board will meet again at 6 p.m. Thursday, June 4 virtually on Zoom.
What will happen after the election board finishes its work isn’t clear because they don’t know how it’s going to end up yet, Williams said at the May 21 meeting.
“In general … it’s either OK or it’s not,” Kelso added. “And if it’s not, it’s passed along for further investigation to the prosecutor. I’m not saying that’s what’s going to happen in this instance, that’s just the process.”
It’s also possible that the board’s investigation would lead the board “to make recommendations as to actions that could be taken in the clerk’s office to better administer the early voting election process … before the next election,” Williams said.
Kelso said that anyone else who had ballot problems should contact the board.
“I don’t know about you all, but I, too, have been getting phone calls from people about ballots without initials, ballots with one set of initials but not the other,” she said. “… I’ve asked each of those folks to please submit something in writing if they wish for it to be investigated, and I think that’s something we’ll have to deal with on a case-by-case basis.”
Ballots not coming
May 21 was the deadline for a voter to return an application to receive a mail-in absentee ballot.
At least 100 voters did not make that deadline, said Fulton, who had helped process some applications. All the applications that arrived after May 21 were file-stamped with the date that they did arrive, separated by township, alphabetized and placed in a binder, he said.
Smith said she was not planning to notify those voters that they missed the deadline and would not be receiving a ballot in the mail, because the state had told her that her office isn’t responsible for doing that.
Kelso and Williams were of the opinion that someone needed to.
Williams made a motion to move four absentee voter board members from working in-person early voting to a different task: calling every voter whose ballot application came in too late to receive a mailed ballot, and explaining how, when and where to vote in person if they still wished to vote.
Smith voted against, saying that it would set a precedent.
“I’m OK with that,” Kelso said.
Some voters didn’t put phone numbers on their mail-in ballot application because that part was optional, Smith said.
County commissioner Diana Biddle offered to help look up those voters’ phone numbers through other county records.
“We owe people our best effort,” Kelso said.
Counting votes
All mail-in and walk-in absentee ballots are being kept in locked ballot boxes. They are not to be counted until election day.
When the boxes are opened, a bipartisan team is supposed to be checking that the voter’s signature on the ballot matches up with the signature on that voter’s registration and that both parties initialed the ballot. Then, the valid ballots will be fed into the vote counting machine.
At the May 21 meeting, in the midst of a different discussion about signatures on ballots, Kelso said that the election board would “err on the side of the voter to any extent possible. You have our assurance that we are not looking for reasons to disqualify voters” because of things like a signature placed in the wrong spot.
Smith said on May 29 that if voter signatures on the ballot envelope and ballot application are a questionable match, she can pull up the voter’s record and signature in the Statewide Voter Registration System for a “best, two out of three” determination.
If one party representative has not signed a ballot, it will be disqualified and won’t be counted, she said.
At the May 27 meeting, Williams proposed that no absentee ballots be counted until members of the election board or their proxies were present and able to inspect each ballot. Williams and Kelso voted in favor; Smith voted against, saying that they already had ballot counters scheduled to verify things.
“This would just be an additional set of eyes and ears to protect everyone, Kathy, including you,” Kelso said, “but if you want to vote ‘no,’ that’s your right.”
Absentee votes — both in person “early” voting and by mail — will make up a much larger chunk of the election than usual, which could mean that election results could be delayed depending on how long it takes to inspect the absentee ballots.
Results will be reported on bcdemocrat.com the evening of June 2 starting sometime after polls close at 6 p.m., and complete election coverage will appear in the June 10 paper.
