350 Lebanon County voters received a duplicate mail-in ballot over the weekend

Lebanon County officials are reporting that some mail-in ballots were inadvertently printed and mailed twice, but they will not affect the results of the April 23 primary.

The Lebanon County Board of Elections has discovered that a batch of 350 mail ballots were inadvertently printed and mailed twice, officials said in a release Monday afternoon.

The duplicate ballots are identical in both serial number and barcode to the first ballot sent and therefore cannot be processed and counted more than once, according to election officials.

Sean Drasher, Lebanon County Chief Clerk of Voter Registration, said the duplicate ballots cannot affect the vote in any way because of the unique identifiers, such as the barcodes and serial numbers.

"It's already built into the system that you can't double vote," he said. "Even if we tried, we couldn't run the second ballot and be accepted. Whichever one goes first is it. ... I could print 10 of them and put them through the machine and only the first one is going to work. Then the others will be kicked out and labeled duplicate."

The ballots were mailed on Wednesday, April 17 and some were received beginning Saturday, the 20th. Originally, those 350 voters were sent ballots on April 13.

Many of those 350 voters have already completed and returned their mail-in ballots, rendering the duplicates “void.”

“Human error is still a potential in elections, but the identifying barcodes and serial numbers are the failsafe that guarantee one voter, one vote," Drasher said. “We will be reviewing our processes for future elections to prevent the possibility of human error in sending a duplicate batch to printing."

Polls will be open from 7 a.m to 8 p.m. on Tuesday, April 23, along with a drop-off point at the Lebanon County Courthouse for mail-in ballots during the same hours.

Residents looking for more information can visit the Lebanon County Voter Registration Office website at http://www.lebcounty.org/depts/Voter_Registration or contact them by phone at 717-228-4428.

Matthew Toth is a reporter for the Lebanon Daily News. Reach him at mtoth@ldnews.com or on X at @DAMattToth.

This article originally appeared on Lebanon Daily News: 350 Lebanon PA voters receive duplicate mail-in ballot over weekend