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Date: 10/26/2022
NORTHAMPTON – While some mail-in voting ballots were marked with incorrect addresses and sent to Shutesbury, Northampton City Clerk Pamela Powers told Reminder Publishing the city is aware and working to make sure the ballots arrive on time for election day.
“We are in communication with Shutesbury, and they are being redirected to us,” she said. “We’ve already gotten over 50 of them from Shutesbury.”
Powers said the ballots labeled incorrectly were sent out the first day ballots were mailed.
“We went through many of the ballots before they left, it was only voters who were affected by ballots that went out the first day. We did two mail trays and we tried to pinpoint the ones that were mailed out that day because we had set them up by when people had put in their applications,” she said.
Despite the confusion, Powers said the ballots are being tracked and are on their way to the proper destination ahead of election day.
“We’ll continue to work with Shutesbury to make sure we get them. They’ve provided courier service, we’ve provided courier service to pick up the ballots and so far, it’s been working well,” Powers said.
With many ballots going out to residents, Powers said it was difficult to pinpoint exactly how many had the wrong town.
“We must’ve at some point either in the kits or in the ones we kitted ourselves, we didn’t notice that the return address was going to Shutesbury so it’s hard to pinpoint now because we’ve mailed out about 7,000 ballots. There were probably 400 that we didn’t have a chance to double check,” she said.
Powers said a similar situation happened during the 2020 election when ballots from other cities and towns were being sent to Northampton.
“In 2020 we had a similar situation where some of the envelopes that we received actually had the wrong address again and we couriered back and forth to make sure that every ballot that was received by election day was directed to the right location,” she said.
In these situations, Powers said they are resolved by communities working together.
“This is an envelope labeling issue, but we do get other communities’ ballots directed to us, and we either courier them or if there’s enough time, we’ll drop them in the mail and get them re-routed,” she said.
While the ballot issue is being sorted out, Powers said this year’s mail-in voting has been a success.
“In a seven-day period of those that we mailed out, we already received 700 ballots, we are having very excellent returns from voters so far,” she said.