About 60,000 Georgia voters recently received absentee ballot request forms with the wrong return mailing or email address.
Election officials said Wednesday that the absentee ballot requests will be delivered to their correct destinations, even if voters send them to the erroneous pre-printed addresses.
The misprints occurred among absentee ballot request forms mailed to Georgia’s 6.9 million active voters by the secretary of state’s office last week, an effort to encourage voting away from precincts during the coronavirus pandemic.
The issue affected voters in Troup County in west Georgia and Dawson County north of Atlanta.
In Troup County, the return address for the local elections office listed the post-office box number as the street number, according to the county’s Facebook page. The U.S. Postal Service told the county it will deliver the forms to the correct address.
In Dawson County, the absentee ballot request form listed a Decatur County email address where it could be returned. Forms emailed to Decatur County in Southwest Georgia will be forwarded to Dawson, according to the county’s elections office.
Gabriel Sterling in the secretary of state’s office said election officials tried to catch errors and moved quickly when they were discovered.
“The two counties where we found an error, it has not fundamentally impacted voters’ ability to request a ballot,” said Sterling, implementation manager for Georgia’s voting system. “We feel confident about the outcomes in this to keep people safe and healthy when voting.”
Seth Bringman, a spokesman for the voting rights group Fair Fight Action, said the secretary of state’s office should conduct a thorough review to detect inaccurate information that’s being distributed to voters.
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