Mail-in ballots addressed to dozens of homes in New Jersey’s Morris Township may have been destroyed in a mail truck fire, Morris County Clerk Ann Grossi announced on Wednesday.
The ballots, sent to residents ahead of the state’s July 7 primary per Gov. Phil Murphy’s (D) executive order requiring ballots to be sent to every registered voter, were addressed to 91 homes in the county. Morris County remains a GOP stronghold, despite the Garden State’s Democrat leanings, overall.
Officials say Saturday’s mail-truck fire affected both Republican and Democrat mail-in ballots.
“A postal vehicle experienced mechanical problems and caught fire on the afternoon of June 20, on Lord William Penn Drive,” George Flood, spokesperson for the Northeast region of the U.S. Postal Service, said, according to North Jersey.
“At the time of the fire, the truck contained mail for a total of 91 addresses on six streets remaining on the route,” he continued. “We notified residents at the 91 addresses involved.”
“In addition, we alerted the Morris County Board of Elections to enable the eligible residents to receive replacement vote-by-mail ballots,” he added.
Those who have yet to receive their ballots are asked to call the clerk’s office.
The news comes on the heels of another ballot-related incident, as hundreds of New Jersey Republicans received misprinted mail-in primary ballots, listing Democrat candidates instead of Republicans.
As Breitbart News reported:
As it turned out, anywhere from 500-700 of the 2,400 registered Republican voters in Bernardsville received a misprinted ballot listing Democrat candidates instead of Republicans.
While the county clerk’s office typically prepares the ballots, the office outsourced the work to the printing company Reliance Graphics, Inc., due to the governor’s last-minute order requiring county election officials to send ballots to all registered Republican and Democrat voters and VBM ballot applications to “unaffiliated and inactive voters,” citing coronavirus-related concerns.
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Notably, Somerset County Clerk Steve Peter said the PDF proof, which Reliance sent over ahead of printing and distribution, posed no issue. However, Reliance President Bob Fetterly called the mistake a “human error but would not elaborate on what exactly happened or why the error only affected 500 to 700 Bernardsville Republicans,” according to NJ.
Reliance President Bob Fetterly attributed the mistake to “human error.”
“It was a misprint,” Fetterly said. “Human error. We mailed over 1.5 million ballots in the last couple of weeks and 500 went astray. So we apologized for it, but it was a human error… we had a success rate of 99.99 percent.”
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