The Middlesex County Clerk's office says it's been strapped by the state's new vote-by-mail policy.
About 10,000 of the vote-by-mail ballots that the Middlesex County Clerk's office sent out last weekend contained errors in the recipients' addresses, authorities said.
County Clerk Elaine Flynn said several confused residents called the her office, wondering why their information was listed incorrectly and worried their vote wouldn't be counted if they sent their ballot back.
(One of our very own NJ Advance Media reporters was even the recipient of a wrongly-addressed mailer).
"The ballots are valid, and the voters should use the materials they received," Cassandra Achille, supervisor of the election division, said in a written statement. Achille assured recipients that their returned ballots would be counted.
When processing bulk-mail, postal workers don't read the addresses, but instead, machines scan the barcodes printed on each envelope. Those barcodes insured the ballots were delivered to the right place, Flynn said.
Voters will receive mailers letting them know their votes will still be counted, despite the error. Still, the mistake, first reported by the New York Times, "was embarrassing," said Michael Maroney Jr., executive vice president for Universal Mailing Services, which sent out the ballots for the county clerk.
"It was almost impossible to catch visually," Micheal Maroney, executive vice president of Universal Mailing Service said of the 10,000 vote by mail ballots sent out with addresses containing extraneous information. (Cassidy Grom | For NJ.com)Cassidy Grom | Nj.com
Universal Mailing has sent out the sample ballots -- the documents that list an area's candidates and the recipients' polling locations -- for 30 years. The company is the go-to mailer vendor for 13 New Jersey County Clerks' offices, and process and send off two million sample ballots each year.
The issue with the vote-by-mail ballots, he said, was a technical error.
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Typically, the clerk's offices send Universal a list of registered voters' addresses, then Universal's computer programs read the list and print the addresses. However, the list Middlesex sent over for their vote-by-mail ballots had a different format this year that the existing computer programs couldn't read it.
Maroney said his employees created a new "down and dirty" program that could understand Middlesex's format, and it seemed to work fine. But the program lacked the capability to recognize empty spaces on Middlesex's spreadsheet and instead filled it in with information from above addresses.
"Actually my kids both voted by mail and their's were both wrong," Maroney said.
He said none of the inserted information was sensitive and 98 percent of the ballots were delivered.
Maroney estimated Middlesex paid the company $5,000 to send out the vote by mail ballots, in addition to the usual $20,000 to send out sample ballots, which did not contain the address errors.
Universal Mailing Service workers process unrelated mailers on the same machine used to process vote by mail ballots. (Cassidy Grom | For NJ.com)
In August, Governor Phil Murphy signed a new law requiring county clerk's offices to mail ballots for the 2018 election to those who had voted by mail in the 2016 election. The ballots went to 2016 vote-by-mail voters whether or not they asked for the 2018 ballot. Flynn said her office hurried to prepare the ballots before the November 6 election, forcing the regular election workers to clock in hours of overtime.
"You have no idea," Flynn told NJ Advance Media at her office in New Brunswick, as workers walked quickly around the room, sorting voter registration applications into dozens of piles.
"We didn't plan for it. We didn't have the budget for it."
Flynn said they ordered materials for the extra vote by mail ballots as soon as they heard about the new law, but their office didn't have space to store the extra boxes -- or the workforce. She called in help and added four workers from the passports and registry departments, but even with the extra hands, the office has been a stressful environment, she said.
On Wednesday, a supervisor in a neighboring office space hollered at a co-worker, seemingly stressed by the extra demands the address errors brought.
In 23 years of being the county clerk, Flynn said the last time she faced this amount of pressure was after Hurricane Sandy when several polling stations were flooded or damaged just days before the 2012 election.
"Whatever it takes, I'm here," she said.
Cassidy Grom may be reached at cgrom@njadvancemedia.com Follow her at @cassidygrom. Find NJ.com on Facebook.Have a tip? Tell us. nj.com/tips.
