Sometimes officials send duplicate ballots. Here's how security measures prevent double voting.
Ahead of the Wisconsin Supreme Court election in April, Green Bay election officials accidentally sent duplicate ballots to 150 voters, prompting an administrative complaint before the Wisconsin Elections Commission and conspiracy theories online.
In a slightly different example from this year, some voters in Maryland initially received primary ballots for the wrong party. Election officials then intentionally issued new ballots for the correct party to all voters who had requested a mail ballot, and the original ballots were voided. Nonetheless, President Donald Trump falsely suggested that nobody knew what was happening with the original ballots and that “any Republican running in Maryland doesn’t have a chance” because voters who received them, which were disproportionately Democrats, would be allowed to vote twice.
Despite the heightened attention, election officials accidentally sending duplicate ballots — or sending out an erroneous batch before intentionally sending corrected ballots to the same voters — is a rare but well-understood mistake nationwide that hardly ever results in the type of double voting Trump has warned of.
“Once any ballot is received and accepted, it locks down that voter’s record, so that a second ballot could not be accepted for that same voter,” said Tammy Patrick, chief programs officer of the National Association of Election Officials. “That’s the way it works everywhere.”
https://www.votebeat.org/national/2026/05/29/why-sending-double-ballots-doesnt-cause-issues/