‘Human Error’ Blamed in Thousands of Voters Being Assigned Wrong Ballots

Hundreds of voters cast their ballots in the wrong races during the November midterms after election officials provided erroneous updates to voter lists in Nashville, Tennessee. According to the Associated Press, more than 430 Tennessee voters were affected when officials did not follow the correct steps to make sure voting lists were accurate, a state elections coordinator noted in a review that was released on Friday.

The AP noted that a report from state Elections Coordinator Mark Goins blamed “human error” as the principal cause of the problem in Music City. Officials with the Davidson County Election Commission confirmed that more than 3,000 voters were assigned to one or more districts that were incorrect, and hundreds of voters cast their ballots before the issue was discovered.

The AP noted further:

The contests affected included state legislative races and congressional races, in which Republican state lawmakers had just carved the left-leaning city three ways during once-a-decade redistricting early this year, cutting in and out of some neighborhoods. Republicans ultimately succeeded in their map-drawing push to flip a Democratic seat, contributing to the GOP takeover of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Goins’ report says the root cause of the issues was that Nashville election officials made updates to voter files after the city’s IT GIS division had used geocoding, a computerized process to compare voter addresses to new district boundaries.

Geocoding can be done multiple times in the process, the report says, and the commission did not verify its changes through a final round of geocoding by the IT GIS division, which a commission staff member declined to have done in March after election officials had made thousands more manual edits.

State: ‘Human error’ helped spur wrong ballots in Nashville; report says local election officials didn't use final round of geocoding to confirm voters' new districts; 3000+ voters were wrongly placed, 437 voted in wrong race before issue was flaggedhttps://t.co/ZaAEbqPEQZ

— Jonathan Mattise (@JonathanMattise) December 30, 2022

The report noted that officials determined that the errors were not significant enough to affect the outcomes of any races.

The AP noted that during early voting before the Nov. 8 election, voters in Nashville were being provided ballots for the wrong state and congressional races, which triggered a hurried response from election officials to fix the voters’ districts.

The report said that in the mad scramble to fix the problems under a tight window as early voting began to wrap up by Nov. 3, officials made over-corrections.

“The mistakes spurred a lawsuit, which ended in an agreement with elections officials that allowed people who voted in the incorrect district to cast a provisional ballot, but it would only be opened if an election was contested,” the AP reported. “Paper ballots were also available for people who showed up at the polls and thought their voting machine ballot was wrong.”

“The issues in Davidson County were the unfortunate combination of human error and failure to follow all steps to ensure changes were made accurately,” Goins noted in the report, according to the AP. “I am confident that through the election commission’s continued work with Metro IT Services, as well as assistance from the Comptroller’s office, they can prevent similar issues in future elections.”

In a Friday statement, Davidson County election administrator Jeff Roberts said the report indicated how “redistricting is a complex process.”

He went on to say that working with Nashville’s information technology services and the comptroller’s office “will provide data analysis and validation by multiple independent staff, preventing similar issues in future elections.”

Republican legislatures made a number of changes to shore up voter integrity following the 2020 election which led Democratic critics to predict that they would disenfranchise voters. That didn’t happen and, in some states like Georgia, early voting turnout actually increased.

Gabriel Sterling, the Georgia secretary of state’s chief operating officer, said early last month ahead of the runoff Senate election there was a record turnout for absentee early voting.

“That’s about 8% of the turnout so far. And, they can still be returned up to 7 p.m. on election day at the County Elections HQ,” he said, adding: “I imagine we’ve already eclipsed 2018 voting.” He said the state was on pace to “likely break 1.8 million before the Tuesday election.”

“To put that in perspective, the last midterm runoff had less than 1.5 million votes total in the four-week runoff in 2018,” Sterling added.