BOISE, Idaho — In 40 days, Idahoans will head to the polls to vote in the 2022 May primary election. Already, some voters are sending in their votes on an absentee ballot. Which leads us to a big question from John in Boise.
John writes to us: “While filling out my early absentee ballot, at end of first page, I noticed candidates for district 22 listed. Since I am in district 21, wouldn't that be illegal?
Great question, KTVB went to the source, Ada County Clerk Phil McGrane, for insight on the possible mix up.
“Odds are they got the correct ballot. It's just that this is a year of redistricting,” McGrane said.
Important to remember, Idaho just installed new voting districts as a part of the census process, we do every decade.
“New districts were just put in place in the middle of March in terms of the data being updated. So this is all very new. And it was a race for all the county clerk's offices to get that information completed so we could mail out those very first absentee ballots,” McGrane said.
To help verify the situation, we searched John’s address in the helpful find my ballot search tool on the Ada County Elections website. There we confirmed, McGrane’s hunch is correct. He says this is a good reminder, it never hurts to make sure all your information is up to date.
McGrane said if something doesn't look right, feel free to check, starting with the website.
“You can actually look up your address, find out what district you're in and see a sample ballot that you'll be voting on. So even before you head to the polls, or if you want to check to make sure the ballot that you see online is the one that you got in the mail, just to verify that you can easily independently do that through our website,” McGrane said.
Another issue a voter ran into this week was seeing the wrong party affiliation listed in the state system. Debra let us know that she wanted to affiliate with the Republicans after being unaffiliated, but she saw in her record online that she was listed as a Democrat. What do you do in this situation? McGrane says reaching out to the Clerk’s office is a great step.
“We can easily look in the records. We keep track of everything, and yes, errors can occur. And so, if it was a clerical error on our side, we can fix it. We can even fix it while voters are present at the polls and get that adjusted,” McGrane said.
Debra and the clerk’s office came to the conclusion that it was simply a mistake that has since been fixed. There are receipts, so to speak, on all of the transactions someone has with the clerk’s office. So, if a mistake is made, it is easy to double-check the receipt. It’s just as easy to refute claims made by voters who missed the deadline.
“If someone swears by it, we'll be able to go back through the records and we can fix it if we can find the record. But just somebody asserting that, you know, 'I've been a lifelong X, Y or Z' isn't sufficient. We actually do have to have the paper trail and for everything, whether it's voter registrations, party changes, election history, we keep track of all those records reflecting people's participation,” McGrane said.
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