More Early Voting Chaos: Tennessee Officials Vow to Find How Mistake Led Early Voters to Cast Incorrect Ballots

More Early Voting Chaos: Tennessee Officials Vow to Find How Mistake Led Early Voters to Cast Incorrect Ballots


A county in Tennessee is providing fresh reasoning for states to pull back on most early voting and return to a time when Americans had a single day to cast their ballots.

According to Fox News Digital, Davidson County Election Commission officials say they are scrambling to find out how hundreds of voters cast ballots in the wrong congressional races after a “redistricting mishap.”

Officials told FOX17 Nashville that at least 438 voters were affected by the mistake and that they’ve been working “endless hours” to crosscheck voters’ precincts to make sure they have received the correct ballots for Tuesday’s midterm elections.

“Now, in order to do that, some individuals may vote, instead of voting on the voting machines, you will be offered a yellow envelope that has your name on it with your specific ballot inside,” Jeff Roberts, Nashville’s election administrator, told the local outlet.

He added that officials are going to have to wait until Election Day to find out how voters cast ballots in incorrect districts.

“We will then sit down and see what caused the issue, to begin with, you know, ‘where did it originate?’ So that when we do re-districting again in 10 years, we don’t go through this issue, with the voters getting in the wrong, misassigned precinct,” Roberts noted.

Fox News added:

Election officials have scrambled for days to correct Davidson County’s voting system after The Associated Press reported first that nearly 200 Tennesseans had voted in the incorrect congressional races, while 16 cast votes in a wrong state Senate race and six cast votes in a wrong state House race.

Earlier this year, Republican lawmakers split up multiple precincts throughout Davidson County while redrawing Nashville’s congressional maps in hopes of flipping a Democratic seat. 

The result is that voters now live in fractured precincts, leading some to be grouped into the wrong district by mistake. However, county officials said that there had not been any issues regarding ballots cast in the wrong races during the primaries, which occurred in August.

Republicans are increasingly working to winnow the timeframe for casting ballots.

In Arizona, for instance, GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake has said she would push to limit most voting to a single election day so that the current “election season” would go away.

“Our Constitution says Election Day. It doesn’t say election season, election month. And the longer you drag that out, the more fraught with problems there are,” Lake told ABC News correspondent Jonathan Karl in an interview last month.

And the longer you drag that out, the more fraught with problems there are,” said Lake. “We just saw problems this week with Katie Hobbs, my opponent. She just put out — sent out 6,000 ballots that went – the wrong type of ballots to the wrong people.”


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