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As early voters head to the polls, a picture has been making the rounds on social media claiming, “A very reliable good friend of mine just finished poll worker training, and they texted this to me … Your ballot will be disqualified if it is written on.”
LkldNow reached out to Polk County Supervisor of Elections Melony Bell to get the facts. She explained two scenarios that might lead to questions.
The first is simple: when a voter arrives at the polls, a clerk checks their photo ID and must fill out the stub above the ballot. “Sometimes, when a clerk is checking someone in, they may accidentally write beyond the stub and onto the ballot,” Bell said. “If that happens, the voter will be given a replacement ballot.”
A rejected ballot
The second scenario is related to Polk County’s optical scan voting equipment, which eliminates ballot handling and provides total ballot security, according to the Supervisor of Elections website.
After a Polk County voter marks their choices on a paper ballot, the voter inserts the completed ballot into a scanning machine called a tabulator.
Bell clarified that a tabulator may reject a ballot if more than one oval is marked in a single race, if the ballot is blank, or if there are marks outside the ovals. Any time that a ballot is rejected, a message appears explaining the error, and the voter is made aware of the rejection, according to Bell.
“The machine flags it and says either you undervoted or you overvoted, and there’s something on there, and they will send you back and give you another ballot,” Bell said. According to the Supervisor of Elections website, a voter may receive up to three ballots in order to properly cast their vote.
Bell said the voter has the option to submit their original ballot despite an error. “If they say no, I want it to go through, I want it to count, I don’t want to go back and vote, then that ballot would come into the canvassing board.”
The Polk County Canvassing Board — consisting of Bell, County Judge Hope Pattey, and County Commissioner Michael Scott — reviews rejected ballots to determine the voter’s intent.
Starting off strong
Bell said voting is off to a strong start. As of Oct. 23, nearly 58,000 of eligible Polk County voters, more than 12.5%, had cast their ballots, including almost 23,000 voters in the first five days of early voting.
Bell said the Elections Office thought they might see a drop-off in mail-in voting this election cycle. So far, they’ve counted over 35,000 votes by mail. “We were very concerned about that since the law changed, that you must request a mail-in ballot after each general election … So we tried to do a lot of media marketing, trying to get the word out.”
Bell also mentioned the Supervisor of Elections’ partnership with Citrus Connection to offer free rides to the polls.
“We’re just trying to move the needle any way we can to get people out to vote,” Bell said.
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