Some Allegheny County voters received duplicate mail-in ballots due to system glitch

Some Allegheny County residents who opted to vote through the mail received duplicate ballots, Allegheny County elections officials said, noting a glitch in the state system.

According to a release from Jerry Tyskiewicz, director of the county elections division, an issue with the state system that prints labels for mail-in and absentee ballots is causing some labels to print twice. The issue, which was recently discovered, is impacting only Allegheny County at this time because of a high volume of people requesting mail-in ballots.

The elections division has received more than 172,000 applications for mail-in ballots and about 32,000 have been returned.

According to Tyskiewicz, the high number of ballots is causing the computer system to “time out,” meaning the state server is no longer replying to or fulfilling the data request. After an error message is cleared, the system moves records that were already printed at the time of the glitch back into the queue, causing them to print twice.

After discovering the issue, the elections division was advised to print labels in smaller batches. To prevent duplicates, workers are now noting applications in the queue on the time they were processed, allowing employees to identify records that might be returned to the queue.

Even if a voter receives a second ballot, safeguards are in place to prevent the duplicate ballot from being processed, Tyskiewicz said.

A barcode on the label used for tracking is the same on both labels. When a ballot is returned, the label is scanned. If a second ballot is returned, the system would reject the ballot.

Duplicate ballots are being kept but are not sent to the warehouse to be counted or opened.

Voters are asked to only return one ballot.

If they receive a duplicate ballot, it should be destroyed.