The elections office in Tulare County, in the Central Valley, was suddenly inundated with questions from confused voters.
On the afternoon of October 13, residents began calling and showing up in person at the Visalia voter registration office, fearing they would be accused of committing fraud by trying to vote twice.
Indeed, much to the surprise and dismay of county election officials, thousands of voters had accidentally received duplicate ballots in the mail for the November 3 midterm elections.
In the farming town of Tulare, a place surrounded by walnut and almond orchards as far as the eye can see, 7,791 voters received extra ballots because of an error by a private printer, said Michelle Baldwin, the county’s registrar of voters, who noted that safeguards were in place to prevent the extra ballots from being counted.
The county’s longtime ballot printer, ProVote Solutions, based in Porterville, “accepted full responsibility for the error,” she said.
ProVote Solutions did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“It’s unfortunate that this happened,” Baldwin said. “Of course we would have preferred this not to have happened, but it did, and we tried to make it right and respond within 24 hours.”
It’s the kind of mistake that, in most election years, would probably be a minor news story. County election officials could be trusted to explain the error, said David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research and a former senior attorney overseeing voting enforcement for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.
But this midterm has been plagued by growing distrust in the integrity of mail-in ballots following President Trump’s attempt to restrict them ahead of the November election — an attempt that was blocked last month by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Trump, who remains obsessed with his 2020 election defeat, has repeatedly claimed — without providing evidence — that mail-in voting leads to widespread cheating and fraud. He focused specifically on California, where every registered voter automatically receives a ballot in the mail. Seven other states are doing the same.
Federal officials on Monday charged 28 people with election-related crimes in California, including fraudulent voter registration and making false statements on a naturalization application. Among them were several green card holders, some of whom said they did not remember registering to vote, as Trump administration officials accuse them of doing.
In this tense political climate, Becker said, even the simplest election errors are amplified on social media and become the subject of conspiracy theories, making the job of local election officials much more difficult.
“Accidents happen,” Becker said. “Our elections are incredibly decentralized, run by hundreds of thousands of human beings. As a result, we know there will be human error, but our elections are not designed to be perfect. It’s impossible. What they’re designed to do is be resilient in the face of human error.”
Becker said it’s not uncommon for a voter to receive two ballots. Sometimes a voter calls the local registrar to request a new one because theirs hasn’t arrived in the mail – only to see the original show up. And in other states where voters are required to formally request an absentee ballot, they may forget they did so and show up to vote in person.
That’s why, he says, there are well-established controls to protect against double voting. When a voter votes, they are “immediately marked” in statewide systems, showing that they have done so, he said.
Voting errors are rare but they are not uncommon.
On Monday, the Imperial County Registrar of Voters announced that a “postal error” resulted in duplicate ballots being sent to 160 voters who had requested confidential voter status, meaning that for security reasons their identities and contact information are not listed on public voter rolls.
“The error occurred as the Registrar of Voters’ Office was updating its procedures to track changes in California law,” the elections office said in a statement, adding that on Jan. 1, elected officials and candidates for public office became eligible for confidential voter status, “requiring changes in how their ballots are processed and mailed.”
Tulare County is a mostly rural area that has voted for Trump in the last three presidential elections. Parts of the city of Tulare — population 74,000 — are in the redistricted but still competitive 22nd Congressional District, where a tight race between Rep. David Valadao (R-Hanford) and Democratic challenger Randy Villegas, a political science professor at the College of the Sequoias in Visalia, could determine the balance of power in Congress.
Robert Jones, a strategist for the Valadao campaign, told the Times on Tuesday that the campaign had been in close communication with the registrar’s office and was not overly concerned.
“We have a lot of confidence in the Tulare County Registrar and Elections Office,” Jones said, “and we imagine that with more scrutiny they will be diligent in making sure that only registered voters vote and that they only vote once.”
In a statement, Villegas said he had “confidence in our election process and the steps taken to address and prevent the counting of duplicate ballots.”
Mark Martinez, a political science professor at Cal State Bakersfield, said conspiracy theories about the mistake at Tulare add to an already tense political climate in the Central Valley, where a recent increase in Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations has disrupted farming communities, sent families scrambling to reunite with detained loved ones and led to a decline in school attendance.
“People will move away, stay away or avoid political events, especially if you look like me — if you look brown or Latino,” Martinez said.
The double ballot error in Tulare last week quickly went viral in conservative social media circles, with claims that something nefarious was happening in the middle of a battleground House district. An article on » and “Stop cheating!” It has been viewed over 450,000 times on that platform and screenshots of the post have been widely shared on Facebook with additional comments.
The Republican-leaning city of Tulare has just over 34,500 registered voters, according to the California Secretary of State’s office. Not all of them are in Valadao district.
About 23 percent of the city’s voters received duplicate ballots.
Countywide, about 3% of the 227,000 registered voters were affected.
Baldwin said that as soon as residents began reporting their duplicate ballots, election staff immediately contacted the vendor, who confirmed on the evening of Oct. 13 that the batch of nearly 7,800 ballots had been accidentally reprinted and mailed.
The salesman, she said, quickly printed postcards explaining what had happened and drove them more than three hours to a postal center in Sacramento so they could be quickly processed and received by voters by the end of the week.
The mailer, in English and Spanish, asks those who received two ballots to “securely destroy the duplicate ballot” instead of returning it.
Baldwin said if someone submits two ballots, “that will be flagged” by the safeguards already in place.
The barcode on each voter’s mail return envelope is linked to their voter record, she said. Before a mailed ballot is accepted for counting, election staff scan the barcode, record that the ballot was received, compare the signature on the envelope with the signature on a person’s voter record, and verify whether the person has already voted.
“Your vote remains private,” Tulare County election officials wrote in a Facebook post explaining safeguards against repeat voting. “After verification, your ballot is separated from the return envelope before counting. The barcode on the envelope tracks the return of your ballot, not your vote choices.”
In the comments section, one resident was frustrated but cautious.
“I’m furious this happened THIS YEAR OF ALL YEARS!!” »wrote the resident. “And also, I’m glad there are protections in place in case some idiots try to use both. Damn!!”
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