Almost 100,000 voters in Brooklyn will receive new ballots after a vendor sent return envelopes with the wrong name, address, and voter ID on them, the New York City Board of Elections said on Tuesday.
Elections board spokeswoman Valerie Vazquez-Diaz said the vendor, which prints ballots for Brooklyn and Queens, mistakenly printed the wrong information on "oath envelopes" that were sent to 99,477 voters, CNN reported Tuesday. This comes during a record-breaking year for mail-in ballot requests due to health concerns surrounding the coronavirus pandemic, magnifying some voters' concerns over fraudulent or erroneous voting.
One Brooklyn voter told CNN he fears the mistake could lead to somebody else casting a vote in his name.
"Presumably, someone out there has an envelope with my name on it, and if they don’t read the ballot as closely as I did, they could cast a vote in my name," Anders Kapur said.
Absentee voters in New York are required to enclose their ballots within an "oath envelope," which includes the voter’s name, address, and voter ID, before mailing them back to be counted. CNN said it was unclear if any of the ballots or envelopes had been returned to the elections board.
This is the second time New York City's board of elections has flubbed mail-in voting in Brooklyn. One in four ballots cast for one Brooklyn primary in June were found to be invalid.
A string of recent incidents of faulty mail-in ballots or erroneous voting practices has surfaced during this unconventional election season. A printing vendor in Washington state made a similar error and printed the wrong names on ballot return envelopes, which could affect up to 365 voters. CNN reported that another printing error in Newaygo County, Mich., affected 6,100 ballots.