FRESNO – A recent mishap involving almost a dozen ballots has been resolved and, ultimately, resulted in a “lesson learned” for the Fresno County elections office.
The Fresno County Clerk/Registrar of Voters Department (Department) issued a press release on Nov. 26, 2024 informing the public that 11 voters received – and, subsequently, turned in – the wrong ballot in this past election. Department head James Kus said the error was discovered after the election.
“All of the ballots were counted and processed long before we were aware of the situation,” said Kus. He added that all 11 ballots were counted; none were disallowed.
“They were all counted,” he said. “There’s no way we can go in and reverse a ballot that has been counted.”
The problem, said Kus, stemmed from conflicting information in two databases.
“We ran a comparison between our registration database and our Geographic Information System (GIS) database looking for discrepancies,” said Kus. The comparison found 2,500 addresses that had potential issues. Staff researched the 2,500 and found that the registration database contained wrong information for 1,293 addresses.
Kus said his staff took a three-step approach to rectifying the problem. Step one was the comparison. Step two was flagging the incorrect addresses. The third step was to update the registration database with the correct information.
He also said the GIS database was out of date, due, in large part, to the fact the County has been engaged in various elections since early last year. Kus said his office does not update the database during an election. He said once staff has finished tallying all the results from the Nov. 5 election, they will perform an update on the GIS.
Kus conceded that human error also factored into the equation. He provided a hypothetical example of what his staff encountered when doing its research.
“An address was so bad (in terms of incorrect information) that staff ended up making the wrong choice out of many possible choices,” Kus said. “Let’s say the address is 100 Clovis Avenue, Clovis. There may be three ‘100 Clovis’ avenues. A hundred North. A hundred Clovis. A hundred South Clovis. And there may be three ‘100 Clovis Avenue’ addresses in Fresno.” He admitted that in real situations his staff encountered, they did make the wrong choice. Not often, but it did happen.
The press release noted that the Department performed a routine registration list maintenance activity in September 2024, which flagged and corrected many incorrect voter addresses. But, according to the release, the activity created a small number of novel address update errors. As a result of these new and novel errors, and once the results of the Nov. 5 election have been certified, the Department will update the GIS database using the County Regional Address database.
“The County and major jurisdictions all contribute to it (the Regional database),” said Kus. “We’re out of sync with that now because we haven’t done an update.”
Kus said the Department is taking multiple steps to ensure future errors do not occur. One of these steps is to ensure that the GIS database is always up to date, even when there are back-to-back elections. He remained pragmatic about the situation.
“A learned lesson,” he said. “You hope not to have a learned lesson of that type. You hope your procedures account for that but, in this case, we had conflicting policies.”
