With early voting underway, election officials have discovered that a candidate for Edinburgh Town Council was accidentally omitted from the ballot.
Don McQueen, an independent candidate for the town council, was not listed on the ballot for the town council. In total, four candidates are seeking two seats on the council. The other candidates are Republicans William "Bill" Jones and Marshall Ryan Piercefield and Democrat Ron Hoffman.
The other candidates’ names were listed correctly.
The error was discovered by a voter who was casting an early ballot, and election officials worked quickly to investigate and correct the matter, Johnson County Clerk Susie Misiniec said. The election board met on Tuesday to get direction from its attorney on how to proceed.
Sixteen Edinburgh residents had already cast ballots in the race, and they are being informed of the error and invited to vote again, if they choose, Misiniec said. Those voters are not required to cast a new ballot unless they want to, she said.
Twelve ballots in the race had been cast in person during early voting that is underway daily at the Johnson County Courthouse, and four people had returned paper ballots. All voters who had voted early on an incorrect ballot will receive a letter, Misiniec said.
The paper ballots have already been corrected for any future voters, and the county is working with Election Systems & Software, its vendor for voting equipment, to correct the electronic ballots that are presented on voting machines, Misiniec said.
She looked into how the error could have happened, and said that McQueen’s name was entered into a state election system, but not the county system, and that it wasn’t caught when the staff was proofing the ballot.
"We worked to fix it quickly and move on," Misiniec said.
