The Brown County Election Board will continue its inquiry this week into how a local woman received two absentee ballots in the mail on the same day.
Questions also have arisen about who signed that ballot before it was mailed to her.
In addition, after a story about this voter ran in the May 20 paper, three other voters contacted the election board with various concerns about the way ballots were mailed, and another contacted the newspaper.
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, voting by mail has been allowed for any registered voter in Indiana.
The Brown County clerk’s office has never seen this volume of mail-in ballot requests. On May 20, the day before the deadline to apply to vote this way, requests totaled around 900, said Brown County Clerk Kathy Smith.
Six members of the Absentee Voter Board have been installed to handle all that mail — triple the amount working normally — but they’ve only been helping since May 14.
All the ballot concerns that voters mentioned to the election board but one happened before that date. Three of those situations were discussed in the May 21 election board meeting which took place virtually on Zoom.
‘Findings of fact’
Election board member Mark Williams, an attorney, read a “findings of fact” document into the meeting record about what the board has learned about the duplicate ballot situation so far.
The affected voter asked not to be identified, so she is referred to as “the voter.”
In addition to the fact that the voter received two ballots at the same time, Williams revealed an additional, new concern during the meeting: the initials on the back of one of those ballots — which are supposed to come from a Democrat and a Republican election board member — were not initials that he recognized.
Williams, a Republican, and Michael Fulton, a Democrat, were signing ballots at that time. Both Williams and Fulton said that the initials on the ballot were not in their handwriting.
Williams had questions: Did anyone in the clerk’s office initial the second ballot, causing it to appear to be initialed by himself and Fulton? If so, why? And were any other ballots marked in this way?
Smith, who is secretary of the election board, did not attend the meeting to answer those questions. An ambulance had been called to her office that afternoon. Election board President Amy Kelso told meeting attendees that Smith was unable to attend because she had a medical emergency, so First Deputy Clerk Laura Wert attended as her proxy. Smith was back at work the next morning.
Wert told the election board she was not aware of anyone in the clerk’s office initialing that ballot or any others in that way, but that was up to the clerk to answer.
Election board members also had questions about the processes used to issue ballots to that voter.
Williams, in his findings document, stated that the voter received two ballots in the mail in two separate envelopes on the same day, both with a postmark of May 2.
A ballot request form which the clerk’s office used internally showed that the voter initially requested an absentee ballot by phone around April 27.
In a written statement given to the election board, the voter said she went into the clerk’s office to pay child support and asked at that time for an absentee ballot. No specific date for when this happened was included in her statement. She said she was told that the information would be given to the people in the office who handle absentee ballots. “To my knowledge, no online application was submitted by me, nor did I request an absentee ballot by any other means,” she wrote.
On May 14, Smith told the newspaper that she had received a ballot request electronically for this voter.
The election board consulted the Statewide Voter Registration System help desk in Indianapolis and was told that this voter did not make a request online for an absentee ballot, Williams said.
If a voter doesn’t get a ballot she requested by mail, believes the ballot is lost, or accidentally marks it in a way she didn’t intend, there’s a process by which a new ballot is supposed to be issued. The voter is supposed to fill out a form called the ABS-5.
The election board did not find any evidence that an ABS-5 form was used for this voter, Williams said.
Around May 4, Smith went into the SVRS system and reissued the voter’s ballot. That action canceled the first ballot, which Smith had already prepared, Williams said.
Smith had been postmarking envelopes in batches and not always using them in one day; sometimes, those postmarks would be carried over to another day.
“The board infers that both ballots were sent from the same batch of already-metered ballot envelopes,” Williams wrote.
The voter ended up voting on one of those ballots, and Kelso collected the other one from the voter. It had no ballot application with it, Williams said.
The board believes that the ballot which the voter voted on and returned to the clerk’s office was the one that was canceled in the SVRS system, so an ABS-5 form was delivered to the voter so that she could cast a valid ballot, Williams said.
Williams also asked Wert during the May 21 meeting whether the clerk’s office had issued an ABS-5 form to the voter, and if not, why not? Wert said she didn’t know, as she was not involved that early on in the process.
The election board will continue its inquiry at its next meeting, at noon Wednesday, May 27 via Zoom.
Smith did not answer messages requesting comment before deadline for this story.
Other concerns
On May 20, Kelso received three other letters from voters about their mail-in ballots. Two of them were mentioned by name at the May 21 meeting. A fourth voter called the newspaper to report a different problem the next morning.
Amy Oliver said that in early April, she, her husband, her mother and her son all applied for mail-in ballots. She had checked their voter registrations at the state’s online voter portal, indianavoters.in.gov, and their addresses were correct. She mailed the applications in a single envelope to the clerk’s office at P.O. Box 81, Nashville.
Oliver later learned that the P.O. box number for Brown County listed on the voter application form was wrong. That was an error that only the state could correct, Williams said, and the state did that, but only after some voters had used that P.O. box number to send in ballot requests.
Oliver’s ballot request envelope was returned to her because of the bad P.O. box number. In early May, she sent it back to the clerk’s office addressed to the correct P.O. box.
Her son’s ballot arrived in the mail to their home address on May 5, but that was the only ballot that went there.
Her mother picked up her ballot from her P.O. box in Nashville that weekend. Strangely, that’s where Oliver’s and her husband’s ballots also had been delivered, Oliver wrote. Also, the address on her envelope was an old P.O. box that the family hadn’t rented in about six years — not the address she’d put on her absentee ballot application.
Oliver said the post office workers had been kind enough to put those ballots in her mother’s P.O. box because they knew they were related, and they knew that that old P.O. box didn’t belong to the Olivers anymore.
At the May 21 election board meeting, Wert explained that a mailing address and a physical address are able to be listed in the SVRS database. She said she was standing with Smith when Smith pulled up Oliver’s record in the SVRS, and the old P.O. box number was in the system as a mailing address.
“I don’t know why it’s still in there, but it’s there,” Wert told the board. “It’s nothing that the clerk’s office did.”
Another voter who was not publicly identified wrote to Kelso about the way ballots were folded in the envelope her husband received in the mail on May 19. This voter used to be an absentee ballot counter, and she was concerned that when ballots were opened, the voter’s privacy wouldn’t be protected. With the way the ballot was folded, it would be easy to connect a voter’s name with how they voted, and ballots, even when they are mailed in, are to remain anonymous. Only the envelopes have names on them, not the ballots themselves.
Another voter, Debby Rogers, told the election board about problems she’d had trying to get her completed ballot returned to the clerk’s office by mail.
She applied for a mail-in ballot around April 1 and received a ballot by mail around May 5. On May 6, she attempted to hand-deliver her ballot to the clerk’s office in the courthouse, but was stopped by a security guard who’s been tasked with restricting access to the building during the pandemic.
Rogers decided to send the ballot back by certified mail. She used the correct P.O. Box, 85. She tracked the ballot’s path from Nashville to Indianapolis, but didn’t see any updates or a confirmed delivery after a few days.
On May 19, she called the local post office and the clerk’s office, leaving messages both places. On May 20, she visited the courthouse and could not find the clerk, but got help from the security guard and an Absentee Voter Board member to get the ABS-5 form so she could report her ballot missing. Wert also talked with Rogers and asked her to let the clerk’s office know if the ballot showed up.
Later that day, Wert located Rogers’ ballot, sealed and safe in the absentee ballot box. It had been received on May 8, but the certified mail receipt was still attached. That part was supposed to be given to Rogers at the post office, Williams said.
Williams, a frequent certified mail customer, said it’s not unusual for something like this to happen when mail is high in volume. Wert made arrangements to give Rogers a photocopy of a receipt showing that the ballot was received.
On May 22, Chris Gustin reported to the newspaper that she’d received a ballot from the wrong party in the mail, not the ballot she requested. She called the clerk’s office and was emailed an ABS-5 form to cancel that ballot and get a new one.
Gustin still plans to vote, but she worried that anyone else, when faced with this process, might just “throw in the towel” and decide to skip the primary.
Walk in your mail-in
Wert said that voters who want to track the status of their mail-in absentee ballots or applications can do that at indianavoters.in.gov.
If voters want to avoid using the mail and return their ballots in person, they are allowed to do that.
This week, those ballots can be hand-delivered to Brown County Intermediate School between the hours of 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. any day through Saturday, May 30; on Monday, June 1 between 9 a.m. and noon; or on Tuesday, June 2 between 6 a.m. and noon.
You don’t have to return your own ballot; you can have another member of your household carry it in for you if that person has a signed statement from you saying that you authorized them to deliver it, the election board said. The person delivering the ballot will have to show ID.
No mail-in ballot returned after noon June 2 can be accepted, except for those coming from overseas.
