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Several dozen Lycoming County voters who registered to vote by mail in the June 2 primary received multiple ballots, an error in the system that has since been resolved.
Forrest Lehman, director of Voter Services, explained that the county contracted with a company that prints the ballots.
"It was some kind of processing error," he said.
Overall, multiple ballots were erroneously mailed to about 60 people.
No voter should have received more than one ballot. Voters who experienced the problems were immediately contacted, he said.
Ruth Pepperman, of Williamsport, became aware of a problem after multiple ballots came to her home. Her husband, she noted, votes by mail-in ballot.
"I was just concerned," she said. "They talk about voting multiple times. You don't want fraud. You don't want goof-ups."
After informing the county about the problem, she and her husband received a special delivery letter the next day explaining the problem.
Election IQ, the company contracted by the county to do ballot printing, sent the letters to the voters receiving the ballots.
The letter read in part: "As the June 2nd Primary Election gets closer we have begun sending out Absentee ballots. Unfortunately, during this process a technical error occurred. This error resulted in 62 voters receiving 8 ballots. We deeply regret this error. Please note, only ONE ballot per voter will be accepted. Your return envelopes are bar-coded, so the duplicate ballots cannot be scanned. This error occurred when processing the data through United States Postal Service sorting software. Unbeknownst to us, the data duplicated 8 times for only the absentees sent to us (the printer) on March 31. Please note this was an isolated incident and we have put additional processes in place to ensure this does not happen again."
Lehman made it clear that the problem was an error and not an attempt to create voter fraud. The problem occurred early in the mail-in process.
Lehman said it's difficult to know at this point if the large number of mail-in ballots will delay learning results of elections.
"Our goal to try and get through as many as we can," he said. "We just have to be prepared."
As of Wednesday morning, more than 7,000 voters in the county were seeking to vote by mail in the primary, and although that is an unprecedented number, the hope is that even more people will apply to vote by mail.
Those who opt to vote at polling places will likely encounter long lines winding outside buildings to accommodate the social distancing to keep with COVID-19 guidelines, he noted.
"We still have two weeks for people to apply for mail-ins," he said.
Lehman said he received a few reports of people encountering problems downloading mail-in applications from the county website.
"We can try to help, but there is little we can do," he said. "We are experiencing heavy volume."
Lehman said the online application is administered by the state, and county voter services have no control over the process until the application is completed.
"Sometimes it's a user error," he said. "We certainly want to help everyone."
All mail-in and absentee ballot applications must be received in the county office by 5 p.m. Tuesday, May 26. A late application will not be accepted.
A voted ballot must reach the county election office by 8 p.m. Tuesday, June 2.