Fresno County Election Clerk/Registrar of Voters James Kus wants elections to be perfect.

He can take solace that his vote machines counted every ballot correctly.

However, not every voter got the correct ballot.

After a GV Wire investigation, Kus said that at least 11 voters received ballots with the Fresno City Council District 6 race even though they didn’t live in the district.

“I don’t want there to be any errors. There should never be any errors. Our goal is to have that zero error rate,” Kus said.

As part of the 1% manual count to check the accuracy of ballots, everything added up correctly, Kus said.

“That’s a wonderful thing to know that our tabulators are 100% perfect and we would really love that we were 100% perfect. The irony being that one of the processes that we did to make sure that we got the ballot correctly to everybody had an error and that hurts me a little bit that we didn’t provide that service level that I want,” Kus said.

What Went Wrong

In September, two months before the election, staff checked the address on file with a database known as the Geographic Information System. This is mainly done to ensure each voter is in the correct precinct — a geographic unit of about 1,000 voters who would have the same elections on a given ballot.

“We regularly get addresses that don’t make sense. The voter provides an address that is missing an ‘east’ or a ‘west,’ that is missing a digit or has an extra digit,” Kus said.

Any anomaly is corrected by a human. Of the 1,293 addresses needing an update, at least 11 were changed that should not have been. Kus is trying to figure out why that happened.

“I don’t think that review was done to the level that it should have been. And because of that, while we made a lot of good changes, we had changes for these 11 voters that were not good and should not have been made and should have been caught,” Kus said.

Kus said the mistake was “11 too many, but it’s also a thousand fewer than it was going to be.”

The wrong ballots were not confined to any geographic cluster. Kus said the error appears to be a case of changing “west” to “east” in the address. That would change which precinct and ballot a voter received.

An update from the elections department on Friday said that a review of those initial 1,293 address changed is about “two-thirds completed.”

An update Tuesday said the county hopes to complete its review of the review by Dec. 3 — the date Kus plans to certify the election. The county also said there the GIS database is outdated, “which directly contributed to some of the inadvertent address update errors.”

The county said the elections department will implement “several procedural changes” to prevent a repeat mistake. This includes conducting the address review at least 90 days before the election, a secondary review process to double-check any changes, and another layer of review from a senior IT specialist.

Receiving the Wrong Ballot

After being informed that voter Rick Steitz received a wrong ballot, Kus went line by line of all District 6 voters to find which addresses did not match, and when a change of address was made.

Kus could tell that the city council race appeared on Steitz’s ballot — based on data on the envelope — even though Steitz does not live in the district. The actual result of that vote remains secret. Once the ballot is separated from the envelope — or cast in-person — it is impossible to know who voted for which candidate.

“We then went through all 50,000 (District 6 voters) looking for that situation of the change that occurred for that one voter, and we were able to find 10 others,” Kus said.

In Steitz’s case, what should have been “west” on his mailing address was changed to “east.”

Another close election Steitz received on his ballot but should not have is for Fresno Unified Trustee Region 6. Incumbent Claudia Cazares trailed Daniel Bordona by 141 votes as of Friday.

The District 6 Race

The vote differential between Marine reservist/safety consultant Nick Richardson and attorney Roger Bonakdar — 861 votes as of Friday — is greater than the number of wrong ballots sent.

If there were more erroneous ballots than the margin of victory, only a judge could halt the results, said Matthew Alvarez, an attorney with San Francisco-based Rutan & Tucker, LLP specializing in political and election law.

Richardson said the ballot mistake makes the job of election workers, whom he called “the hardest working people this year,” more difficult.

“Unfortunately, it probably throws a little bit of uncertainty into what is otherwise a very solid trusted process, which is not what we need right now. It’s an example of of a small but very noticeable government mistake. And the government, again, making mistakes is what makes life harder for people,” Richardson said.

Bonakdar declined to comment on the ballot error.

Kus put the error in perspective.

“I hate to minimize because it is our goal that everyone votes, because it is important that everyone votes, and obviously very important to me that everyone votes the right ballot. But those 11 ballots, added or removed, do not change that race right now,” Kus said.