A number of voters in Robbinsville Township, and maybe all of Mercer County, have been informed that their ballots were rejected in the November general election.
The report of disenfranchised voters is just the latest issue with the Nov. 8 election in Mercer County, where voters could not use voting machines at every polling place in the county as a result of a printing problem with the ballot.
Robbinsville Mayor Dave Fried said that a residents in town and throughout the county who voted at the polls on Election Day have received letters informing them that their votes had been discounted.
The letter, which came from the Mercer County Board of Elections said: “This office is in receipt of your provisional ballot for the General Election on November 8th, 2022. Unfortunately, your provisional ballot was not counted for the following reason: Voted by Machine.”
Fried said that the letters are believed to have been sent to voters who signed in at their polling station with the intention of voting on the machine, but were given a provisional ballot because the machine scanners were not processing the ballots.
He said that poll workers were told to have voters do this after the township received a directive by the Office of the Superintendent of Elections when the problem with the voting machines first arose.
However, it now appears that the Board of Elections considered signing the book as a machine vote, even though no vote was actually cast on the machine, only via a provisional ballot, Fried explained. “As a result, those votes—and we don’t have any idea right now how many— were disqualified and those voters were unmistakably disenfranchised.”
Most of those discounted ballots appear to have been cast within the first two hours of the polls opening at 6 a.m.
The township said that Mercer County Superintendent of Elections Nathaniel Walker confirmed in an email to the township clerk’s office that the problem could not be reversed because the election has been certified.
Walker and the Board of Elections did not respond to requests by the Advance for comment on the problem and how widespread the issue was.
“We believe even one uncounted vote is too many, let alone hundreds,” Fried said. “Robbinsville has been among the most vocal critics of the 2022 General Election in Mercer County and has called for a complete overhaul of the process. Brian M. Hughes, the Mercer County executive, has done the same. However, it is patently false for anyone at county to state that every vote was counted. We now know that is, sadly, not true.”
He added: “We have repeatedly expressed our dismay with the unfortunate events surrounding the 2022 General Election, and we will not stop until fundamental changes are made to our election systems in Mercer County.”
The problem with the machines on election day meant that voters had to submit their choices via paper ballots and sharpies. The problem was discovered by poll workers shortly after the polls opened.
Mercer County Prosecutor Angelo Onofri has said that the results of an investigation by his office found no evidence of wrongdoing, and that the problem was caused by a coding error when the ballots were printed. Those codes had not been programmed into the machines.
Mercer County Clerk Paula Sollami Covello had called for an investigation after the Election Day problems to determine “whether this scanning problem occurred based on an error or whether something was intentionally done to create chaos and distrust in the election system.”
Officials have called for investigations into the cause of the problem amidst allegations of corruption by some members of the public.
County Executive Brian Hughes called for the matter to be looked into and for changes in the way elections are run in Mercer. “We’ve got too many people in control and the quality of our elections has suffered as a result, undermining peoples’ faith in the democratic process,” Hughes said.
In Mercer County, there are three separate entities that play a role in elections—the Board of Elections, the Superintendent of Elections and the Office of the County Clerk.
“After issues in the last two elections, I have come to the conclusion that we must fundamentally change the management of the election process in Mercer County because it is clearly not working,” the county executive said.
Fried blasted the county for its election problems in a column in the December issue of the Robbinsville Advance.
“It goes without saying that the last two elections run in Mercer County have not gone as planned,” Fried said. “This is not the time in our country where we can afford any missteps when it comes to the integrity of elections, yet we have now endured them in back to back years.”
A number of voters in Mercer County have been informed their votes were not counted in the Nov. 8, 2022 election.,
