County in Utah Mails Over 13,000 Ballots Without Crucial Component

An election worker feeds ballots into a high speed counting machine to count cast ballots at the Utah County election office in Provo, Utah on June 30, 2020. George Frey/Getty Images

More than 13,000 voters in Utah received ballots without a signature line, according to county officials.

Mail-in ballots in the state must be signed by the voter to be counted. The ballots lacked an area for a signature.

“Tuesday morning is when the first voter called and said, ‘Where do I sign?’” Sanpete County Clerk Sandy Neill told the Salt Lake Tribune. “We had them open the flap, and they told us it was blank.”

“When the next 4,000 calls came in,” she added, “we realized we had a problem.”

Neill didn’t return multiple phone calls, including a voicemail and a message left with reception, from The Epoch Times.

“It’s a pretty big oversight, obviously. A major one because if you don’t sign your ballot it’s not counted," Spencer Dyches, who lives in Ephraim and received his ballot, told KSL-TV.

Photographs published by the broadcaster showed one of the ballots sent out next to a regular ballot.

Neill blamed the printing company that the county uses to print ballots.

California-based company Integrated Voting Systems was named as the printer. The company describes itself as “a national leader in providing proven methods and technologies to the election service industry.”

The company didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The company is paying to send postcards to every vote with instructions on how to sign the ballots in question. If people have already sent in their ballots, they will be told to send in the postcard itself.

If neither of those options work, the county clerk plans to send letters requesting signatures.

“We’ve got this. We’re going to make the votes count,” Neill told KSL-TV. “I’ve had candidates call and very concerned about what it’s going to do to some of these close races and I’ve let them know that we will take care of it.”

Similar situations have unfolded elsewhere.

About 50,000 voters in Franklin County, Utah, received incorrect mail-in ballots this month. Another nearly 29,000 in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, received incorrect ballots in recent weeks.