Boston’s beleaguered Elections Department has made another error heading into next month’s mayoral and city council preliminary elections, by sending multiple ballots to individual residents who have requested to vote early by mail.
Secretary of the Commonwealth Bill Galvin’s office is working with the city’s Elections Department — which the state has been overseeing since last fall’s ballot mess led to widespread voting delays in Boston — to “determine the source of the issue,” Galvin spokesperson Debra O’Malley said Friday.
Galvin’s office received a complaint about a voter receiving two ballots on Friday afternoon, O’Malley said in a statement to the Herald.
“We are working with the Boston Election Department to determine the source of the issue that caused this voter to receive two ballots,” O’Malley said. “At this time, we believe the issue to be special to a very small number of ballots.”
The mayor’s office nor the Elections Department responded to requests for comment.
O’Malley emphasized that safeguards are in place to ensure that “no voter will be able to vote more than once.”
“While clerical errors of this nature are certainly regrettable, it is important to understand that there are several procedures and checks in place to prevent anyone from being able to cast more than one ballot,” O’Malley said.
O’Malley said that once the Boston Elections Department accepts a ballot, the voter who returned it cannot vote again. Only one ballot per voter will be counted.
She also mentioned that “voters who return a ballot are immediately marked on the voter list as having voted.”
“This prevents the voter from voting again, either in person or by mail,” O’Malley said. “Were a second ballot to be returned, that ballot would be rejected upon receipt.”
Still, it’s a shaky start to a closely-watched mayoral preliminary election season for an Elections Department that was placed into receivership last February after multiple polling places ran out of ballots in last year’s presidential election, leading to widespread voting delays and Galvin bashing the city for its “incompetence.”
In that instance, the city was provided enough ballots by the state, but polling places were still left short, leading to last-minute election night chaos and a directive from Galvin’s office to Boston Police to rush ballots to those precincts.
Josh Kraft, Mayor Michelle Wu’s principal opponent, said the up-to-date error from the Elections Department has left him with “serious concerns about the city’s ability” to manage the election.
“The city elections department is already under state receivership on Election Day to ensure we don’t have a repeat of the last municipal election where polling stations ran out of ballots,” Kraft said in a statement to the Herald. “immediately, with Boston voters receiving more than one absentee ballot, I have serious concerns about the city’s ability to manage anything related to the election and may need even more oversight by the secretary of state.”
Wu, the popular first-term progressive mayor, and Kraft, son of the billionaire New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft and former head of his family’s philanthropic arm, are widely seen as the two candidates who will advance past the Sept. 9 preliminary election. Two other candidates are running.
The entire City Council is also up for reelection, with the preliminary coming into play for the at-large seats, as well as those for Districts 1, 2, 4, 5, and 7. District 7 is for the open seat vacated by disgraced ex-Councilor Tania Fernandes Anderson, who is set to be sentenced next month after her conviction on two federal corruption charges.
The best eight at-large council candidates and best two candidates for those contested district council races will advance to the Nov. 4 municipal election.
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