Fort Myers Beach voter alerts poll workers to missing page on ballot
Fort Myers Beach resident Deb Lemmer was taking part in early voting at the Lee County Supervisor of Elections district office in Fort Myers last week and was preparing to turn her ballot in. She then realized several referendum questions were missing from her ballot.
Her ballot did not include the referendum questions on the merger of the Fort Myers Beach Mosquito Control District and the Lee County Mosquito Control District. Her ballot did not include a referendum question on the proposed merger of the Fort Myers Beach Fire Control District and Lee County Mosquito Control District. Nor did include one of the five proposed Town of Fort Myers Beach charter change referendum questions.
“I realized there weren’t any questions about the fire department and mosquito district, but I had a Fort Myers Beach ballot because the other questions were people on Fort Myers Beach,” Lemmer said. “So I knew I had the right ballot.”
Lemmer said she looked over both sides of the ballot to find the referendum questions and said to herself “it has to be on here. This is a big deal.”
Lemmer said she brought the matter up to a couple of poll workers who ultimately printed her a page on her ballot that was missing. They submitted her first page separately that she had filled out, and then the second page separately after printing it out.
Lee County Supervisor of Elections spokesperson Gaby Aguirre said the office deemed the issue a ballot printing error, and it is believed to be the only one of its kind. Aguirre said there was one other issue with a Fort Myers Beach voter during early voting at a Bonita Springs location in which they initially only received the first page of their ballot, and had to ask for the second page of the ballot. In that case, there was no printer error. The voter notified the poll worker of an issue and we received the second page.
The two voting districts of Fort Myers Beach that include the Fort Myers Beach Mosquito Control District and Fort Myers Beach Fire Control District, are the only two districts in the county that have a two-page ballot. Technically, there are three pages so one page is double-sided.
“Fort Myers Beach is the only district with a two-page ballot,” Aguirre said
Lemmer said the poll workers were unable to tell her why she didn’t get the second page initially. They didn’t tell her it was a printing error, or what occurred.
Lemmer, who is the co-owner of Nervous Nellie’s, is concerned other people may have experienced the same voting issue and not realized it.
“I want everybody to know, expect them to hand you two pieces of paper,” Lemmer said. Lemmer said she didn’t know ahead of time to be expecting two pages of the ballot. “Fort Myers Beach is the only one that gets two pieces of paper. I had not been made aware of that in advance.”
Lee County Supervisor of Elections Jenna Persons Mulicka said the two cases appear to be either a printer issue or a poll worker issue.
“We immediately sent out additional memorandums to all the early voting sites, we printed a poster there for the poll workers there, reminding them of what they learned in training to be aware” that Fort Myers Beach ballots have a second page, Persons Mulicka said.
“It won’t be an issue on Election Day, because all of those ballots are already pre-printed by our vendor and ready to go,” Persons Mulicka said.
During early voting, when voters from any precinct in the county can show up at any early voting location and vote, the ballots are printed for each specific ballot for that specific precinct.
Persons Mulicka there are any number of reasons a printer may not have printed out the second page. She said the tech team went out and checked the machine and found no issues. “Sometimes they jam, sometimes they don’t print out consistently,” Persons Mulicka said of other printer issues. “We have not had any other reports of a second page not being printed,” she said.
“The first ticket of an issue we saw, it was reported by the poll workers as being a printer error because they didn’t see a second page laying anywhere. In that case, the voter noticed, and great job voter,” Persons Mulicka said. “That voter was well prepared.” According to what was reported by the poll worker, the voter alerted them of the page not having been printed.
“All of our poll workers are on high alert that all Fort Myers Beach precincts have two pages, and when you see those precincts just slow down and make sure those pages are printed,” Persons Mulicka said.
Aguirre said poll workers have been trained to know Fort Myers Beach has a two-page ballot. “What we did is reinforced that message,” Aguirre said. Aguirre said signs have been posted for poll workers to remember that Fort Myers Beach voters get a two-page ballot. Early voting started on Oct. 19, which is earlier this year.