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Yuma County Accidentally Sends Out 500 Duplicate Early Ballots

The Yuma County Recorder's Office is assuring voters that the Aug. 29 election will run smoothly. This comes after the county accidentally sent out duplicate ballots.

The upcoming election will be the first time Yuma County has used a new automated system to stuff ballot envelopes and send them to voters.

The county recorder says human error ended up doubling up names after misprinted ballots were corrected and sent out.

The early ballots were sent out for the city of Yuma's election — of those, 574 were duplicated. That's out of 24,000 total voters.

Yuma County Recorder Robyn Stallworth Pouquette says if a voter sends in two filled-out ballots, a separate system that counts them will alert officials someone tried to vote twice — and that's illegal.

"We only had about four or five calls from voters that told us, but I think it is confusing because of the few we spoke with, they immediately believed that it was possible to vote twice" she said.

The new system cost about $500,000, and Stallworth Pouquette says it will save costs over the next 8 years.

Stallworth Pouquette says human error while inputting names and addresses led to the additional ballots.

"If you were mailed three or four packages, hypothetically, your first returned ballot would be processed and any additional returns, it would be impossible to accept those, we would log those as a voter attempted to vote twice," she said.

Stallworth Pouquette says the tabulating process uses a different system, so the results would not be affected by this error.

Casey Kuhn was a senior field correspondent at KJZZ from 2015 to 2019.