After 11 voters in Richmond’s 3rd District were able to vote for federal candidates — but not for mayor, City Council or School Board members — the precinct captain overseeing voting at the Calhoun Center in Gilpin Court was removed by city elections officials.
Barbara Burgo’s removal was confirmed by Keith Balmer, Richmond’s general registrar. She told VPM News that she’s worked more than 10 elections for the city.
“I have a new officer who gave out the wrong ballot for 11 persons,” Burgo said this morning. “She’s new. She made a mistake. She’s a human being.”
Balmer, who told VPM News he had not been informed of irregularities at other precincts, said the issues at Calhoun Center were caused by separate federal-only ballots that are supposed to be given to military or overseas voters.
“Every time there’s a federal election, we send our precincts a full ballot that has all the races, and there’s a federal ballot,” Balmer said.
He added that most of the military and overseas voters are absentee voters, but if they show up in person on Election Day, “they can only vote on a federal ballot.”
Every precinct gets the federal-only ballots, and poll workers are trained to know when to give them to voters. Voters who are eligible for these ballots are typically identified individually in pollbooks and ID-verified. But that didn’t happen in this case, Balmer said — echoing Burgo’s explanation that the incident was a mistake.
“The ballots sit in different boxes, and what happened here apparently is someone just opened the wrong one and was not paying attention,” Balmer said.
During a 10 a.m. online briefing, Susan Beals — commissioner of the Virginia Department of Elections — said that the issue had been resolved. She added the impacted voters would not be allowed to cast another ballot following the error.
As of Nov. 1, a record 6.37 million voters were registered in Virginia — about one-third of whom cast their ballots early, according to Beals.
She said 16,557 people had already registered to vote before Election Day through a process known as “same-day” registration. She said she expects many more registrations throughout the day, encouraging voters to find their polling locations online if they haven’t already done so.
“We want every eligible voter to vote in this election,” Beals said. “Anyone who is canceled for noncitizenship status and feels as though it is in error can go to their polling location today — on Election Day — same-day register to vote and cast a ballot in this election.”
She also noted that today is the last day to mail absentee ballots for them to be counted; as of 10 a.m. about 126,200 mail-in ballots had yet to be returned. The ballots must be received in the mail by noon Friday to be counted, Beals said.
School Board member Kenya Gibson, who’s running for the 3rd District council post, was at the Calhoun Center on Tuesday morning, when she expressed concern over the mistaken ballots.
“This is alarming and we should all be concerned,” Gibson said. “At the end of the day, people should be able to vote up and down the ballot — especially the local elections, they really matter — especially the folks who are living here in Gilpin Court.”
Gibson added that she was relieved the issue at the precinct was resolved, but she was also disappointed that such a mistake occurred.
