Grand Rapids, Michigan, has lost a tray of absentee ballots, City Clerk Joel Hondorp told The Federalist. The city is investigating but does not yet know where the ballots went.
“Voters were calling, saying, ‘Hey, we didn’t receive our ballots,’” Hondorp said. “There’s a tray of ballots that were set to be mailed out. Looks like it may have got to the post office, we’re trying to figure out where the disconnect is.”
A tray holds close to 300 ballots, according to Hondorp. His office is working with the United States Postal Service to investigate at what point the tray of ballots got lost.
“We do ballot tracking with our mail vendor, and so we can kind of verify where a tray gets scanned into the system,” Hondorp said. “We’re investigating right now.”
Hondorp said his office has sent 100 replacement ballots to voters who did not receive theirs. If anyone submits duplicate ballots, he said his office would “spoil” one of the ballots so only one vote counts per voter.
“If for some reason this tray shows up somewhere, and then they get another ballot in the mail, we know which ballot to count so they don’t return two,” Hondorp said. “If two ballots happen to come back to us, we know we only keep one of them.”
A few ballots sometimes get lost in the mail, Hondorp said, but typically the number is not this high. “It doesn’t seem to be a whole tray in the past. We
