Earlier this month, Montgomery County Election officials warned voters to be on the lookout for mail ballots that are only printed on one side, because for the November 3 election, all mail ballots in Montgomery County were supposed to be printed on two sides.
About 16,000 mail ballots were printed on only one side, so if voters use one of the defective ballots they would not be able to vote yes/no for the retention of judges, which appears on “the flip-side” of most of the ballots that were mailed.
The one-sided mail ballot problem that county election officials have working to remedy pales in comparison to what happened in 2016, when thousands of Montco voters had not received their absentee ballots (that’s what they were called then) within days of the November 8 election. Because so many voters hadn’t received their ballots in a timely fashion, a Montgomery County judge granted an extension on the deadline. And even then, according to the Inquirer, several hundred ballots were never counted.
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One reason that absentee ballots are arriving on a later schedule this year is because there were some questions on the wording of a ballot question. In the spring, the county had to act quickly to comply with two last-minute ballot changes.
“We did delay a short time, waiting for some clarification on that,” Arkoosh said. “It was a decision that our team made.”