More than 1,000 Virginia voters who applied for absentee ballots have received an extra one in the mail, state Republican Party officials said Friday.
The mix-up comes shortly after a Democratic push to expand absentee voting in a bid to reduce the spread of the coronavirus. As a result, absentee ballots no longer require an excuse, and any registered voter is allowed to request one.
“We knew the Democrats many last-minute changes to our election law would make our elections less secure, but no one could imagine voters receiving two ballots,” Rich Anderson, the state’s GOP chairman, said in a statement.
Officials blamed the confusion on label printing machines that jammed, erroneously causing some to be duplicated when entire pages were reprinted due to damage to just some of the labels.
“Before the supervisors caught it, the people applying the labels applied them to the entire sheet of labels rather than just pulling out the ones that should have been processed,” Fairfax County Registrar Gary Scott told NBC 4 Washington.
