Santa Cruz County ballot errors impact more than 1,100 voters

By Felix Cortez

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    SANTA CRUZ, California (KSBW) — Two ballot blunders in Santa Cruz County are impacting hundreds of ballots that could ultimately impact the outcome of two ballot issues.

“You know, we’re human, errors do sometimes happen,” said Trisha Webber, registrar of voters for Santa Cruz County.

The mistakes were made by the Santa Cruz County elections office and are impacting more than 1,100 ballots. In one case a key ballot measure was left off the ballot in the other case, voters were given wrong voting instructions.

The elections office, once they were made aware of their mistakes, notified voters and sent them replacement ballots.

“Every vote does matter. That’s why as soon as we identified the error, we wrote a letter, put it on our website, notified the district, and sent everything out to the voters to give them a second opportunity to vote the corrected ballot,” Webber said.

Here are the ballot mistakes voters should be aware of. In a school board race for the Lakeside School District, voters were incorrectly instructed to vote for no more than three candidates; it should say vote for no more than two. In that case 885 ballots were impacted there.

In the other case, Measure R a bond measure for the Central Fire district was left off 284 ballots. Those behind the measure are hoping to raise millions to replace aging equipment and repair instruction. In both cases, the registrar of voters said human error is to blame.

“There’s a new mailing, a new ballot creation, staff time to segregate out the ballots and match that up and do that sort of stuff. But that’s not being directed back towards the districts that was our error and we will not bill the districts for our errors,” Webber said.

But the errors could have an impact on the final election results. Voters are being advised to vote with their replacement ballot, if you do nothing, your old ballot will be processed and in the case of Measure R which needs a two-thirds vote to pass every vote could count.

“If not, we’ll take those original ballots, and we will put them through and tabulate them as is, which would result in an undervote for Measure R since they did not vote for it,” Webber said.

If you think you’re one of the more than 1,100 voters impacted by the ballot mistakes and you didn’t get a replacement ballot, contact the elections office. Another option would be to vote on Tuesday in person at any precinct in Santa Cruz County.

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