VIRGINIA BEACH — As Election Day nears, thousands of residents across the city will mail in their ballots instead of voting in person.
Approximately 7,400 city residents received a corrected ballot last month after candidate names in several districts were printed in the wrong order.
City officials notified residents of the mistake on Sept. 19, and have since mailed corrected ballots.
The cost to reprint corrected ballots was $6,223.84, according to Christine Lewis, the city’s director of elections and registrar. Virginia Beach uses business reply mail, which means the city only pays for return postage of ballots that are mailed via the U.S. Postal Service.
The city sent approximately 26,000 mail-in ballots to residents in mid-September. On Sept. 18, city officials realized that candidates for City Council in Districts 3 and 7, as well as School Board candidates in District 4, were printed in the wrong order on the mail-in ballots.
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Virginia has specific rules regarding the order of candidates listed on the ballot. The list order is determined by the time that the candidate files to run for the seat.
Kenneth Slobodkin lives in District 7 and received an incorrect ballot. It listed City Council candidate Mabinty Saffie Scott above Cal F. “Cash” Jackson-Green, Jr. He later received a corrected ballot, which lists their names in reverse order.
A city webpage advises residents to shred the incorrect ballot or return it to the registrar’s office unvoted. But the explanation letter Slobodkin received with his corrected ballot doesn’t mention discarding or destroying the incorrect ballot and that concerns him.
Slobodkin recently wrote a letter to the City Council about “perceived” election fraud as a result of extra blank ballots “floating around the city.”
“Even if the city had a 100% success rate identifying and stopping fraud, the optics of this situation are concerning,” Slobodkin wrote in the letter.
Safeguards are in place to ensure only one vote per person will be counted, according to Lewis. If a resident sends the wrong ballot back, it will be hand-counted, according to the city. The state’s election database doesn’t allow more than one envelope per voter to be scanned, the registrar wrote in an email this week.
“An error message appears stating the voter has already voted,” Lewis said.
Early voting began Sept. 20. Ballots returned by mail must be received by noon Nov. 8 to be counted.
As of Thursday, Virginia Beach mailed out a total of 37,472 ballots and 206 re-issues for people who didn’t received one or made a mistake and requested a new one, according to Lewis.
In the 2022 General Election, Virginia Beach received 19,362 mail-in ballots, according to Virginia Department of Elections. The data includes ballots mailed to voters and returned by mail to the elections office or to a drop-off location.
Stacy Parker, 757-222-5125, stacy.parker@pilotonline.com
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