What happens when the signature section of the return envelope for a mail-in ballot isn’t there?
Yellowstone County News received a few phone calls from voters after the primary election, who had that experience and wanted to know how that could happen and how the county election department handles the situation.
Lennie Bhuman of Shepherd told YCN that his wife’s return envelope didn’t have the signature area printed on it, while his did. He said that they photo-copied the section from his envelope and taped it to her envelope. “Whether her vote counted, I don’t know,” he said, but that’s how they mailed it in.
It’s a rare thing to happen, says Yellowstone County’s Elections Administrator Brett Rutherford, but it does occasionally happen. It happens when more than one envelope gets pulled through the press that prints them. In this case it must have pulled up “a clump” of “affidavit” envelopes, said Rutherford, since the problem seems to have manifested itself in roughly the same area of the county.
Dan Henrichs, who lives just across the river from Bhumann, reported the same experience. Henrichs said that they had just arrived home from a trip and when they realized the problem with his ballot, they didn’t have time to pursue any alternative. Henrichs said that his son and daughter-in-law who live in the Heights, said that their return envelopes didn’t have the signature section either but they didn’t think about it at the time and just mailed them in.
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