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About 6,000 El Paso County voters will be getting new mail ballots after the original ballots they requested were sent without one statewide race listed.
Human error led to the race for Texas agriculture commissioner being left off the ballots that were mailed out on or before Oct. 4, said Lisa Wise, El Paso County elections administrator. Ballots mailed after Oct. 4 are correct, she said, estimating that the county has received about 8,000 mail-in ballot requests so far.
Voters who were sent the ballot without the agriculture commissioner race will be sent a new ballot with a notation on the envelope saying “corrected ballot.” If voters return both the original ballot and the corrected one, only the corrected ballot will be counted.
Wise said her department will make several efforts to alert affected voters.
“We’re going to be contacting each voter by phone if they put a number on their application, as well as sending a reminder notice once the corrected ballot has been sent out,” she said.
Voters with questions about the status of their mail-in ballot can call the County Elections Office at 915-546-2154.
Texas law limits eligibility to vote by mail to people over age 65, those with disabilities, people expecting to give birth within three weeks of the election, people confined in jail, and those who will be out of town during the voting period, including college students.
Mail-in ballots requests must be received by the County Elections Office by Oct. 28.
During the primary elections this spring, new mail-in ballot requirements passed by the Republican-controlled Legislature caused repeated confusion as more than 24,000 ballots were rejected across the state.
That included 758 people in El Paso. An El Paso Matters analysis showed that the rejected ballots were concentrated among the county’s longest tenured and most active voters.
