KALAMAZOO COUNTY, MI (WKZO AM/FM) — Kalamazoo County Clerk Tim Snow is addressing a misprinted ballot that caused some confusion in Precinct 7 recently.
During a virtual meeting Tuesday night, Snow spoke at length with the County Board of Commissioners to explain the error and what has been done to fix it.
County Board Candidate Veronica McKissack had originally reported the error to Township Clerk Mark Miller when her neighbor noticed that her name was not on her absentee ballot. Mail-in voting is currently underway.
McKissack says for a candidate, this is a huge concern. She is running in the August Primary against fellow Democrat Chris Pomeroy for a spot on the November ballot.
The error concerned a listing of District 4 county commissioner candidates instead of the correct District 5 candidates. Snow said that a technological error was the reason behind the misprint, but the error has since been corrected.
“When we discovered the ballot error in Kalamazoo township, that was a quick fix because it was simply a check mark that was in the wrong column,” Snow said. “We were doing a setup in our new software, this is the first primary election we’ve held in our new software. When we set it up, the wrong check mark was in the wrong column. It just got missed while we were doing all the proofing.”
The error was first reported on July 11.
“I came in, it took less than an hour to fix that,” Snow said. “We had the replacement ballot to the printer that Saturday. The Township had their ballots on Tuesday and began immediately to send out the replacement ballots. By Friday at about three o’clock, every replacement ballot had been processed out of Kalamazoo Township.”
Snow added that the ballots should be in the hands of absentee voters by this week and that the error should never happen again.
Affected voters should be on the lookout for a replacement ballot, which will arrive in an envelope with a special replacement sticker on it, along with a letter from Snow explaining the mistake.
Meanwhile, Snow said there has been a large amount of absentee ballots sent out as a whole.
“As of 4:45 this afternoon, we hit the 54,000 mark as far as number of ballots being issued by the local units,” Snow said. “Based on our registered voter count, almost 27 percent turnout, that’s just with the absentee ballots.”
Snow also estimated that the votes will surpass the County’s 2018 turnout by the end of this week, which was over 55,000.
