Why voters receiving multiple ballots doesn’t mean multiple votes

Early voting in the U.S. midterm elections is underway. Voters are deciding which party will control Congress, as well as numerous state legislatures and governors’ offices. Snopes’ fact-checkers are flagging rumors surrounding the election, debunking false statements by candidates and suspicious voter fraud claims with nonpartisan research and expert sources. Join our effort to keep this election fact-focused by becoming a Snopes member.

In October, Tulare County, California, said on Facebook (archived) that some voters may have received “duplicate vote-by-mail packets” for the Nov. 3 midterm election.

The Sacramento Bee — citing Michelle Baldwin, the county’s registrar of voters — reported that a printing vendor had mistakenly printed and sent extra ballots to 7,791 voters.

The incident in Tulare County appeared to play into a long-standing theory of fraud: namely, that some voters receive multiple ballots, allowing them to vote multiple times in the same election and skew results in favor of a particular party or candidate. 

One X user reacting to news about voters in California receiving extra ballots wrote (archived): “Shocker… We’ve been talking about receiving multiple ballots every election cycle since 2018 and how big a problem it is, only to be told we’re wrong or lying by internet ‘fact checkers.'”

The X user above was correct that voters receiving multiple ballots is a known election phenomenon. In the run-up to the 2026 midterms, election officials in Michigan and California addressed the issue in local media. The Bipartisan Policy Center, a nonprofit organization, discussed the issue in a February report on voting by mail.

However, we found no documented examples of voters receiving multiple ballots and casting multiple votes on a large-enough scale to skew election results. There can be legitimate reasons why voters receive or turn in multiple ballots in a single election. Some incidents, such as the one in Tulare County, can be attributed to human error. Other times, election officials might send a second ballot if the first contained an error. Either way, officials have well-established safeguards in place that prevent voters from voting more than once.

Tammy Patrick, chief programs officer at the National Association of Election Officials, an association that trains and certifies election and voter registration officials, told Snopes the data does not support claims that fraudsters are using multiple ballots per voter to skew election results, mainly because it would be extremely difficult to pull off such a scheme. Patrick said:

There’s a saying, “Is the juice worth the squeeze?” And in this case, it isn’t. When we think about voters being able to vote multiple times because, that is what it comes down to here: Is there anyone who is being able to vote more than once in a jurisdiction because they got more than one ballot? That does not happen.

Because there was no documented proof of fraudsters skewing elections by issuing multiple ballots to individual voters, we leave this claim unrated.

Tracking ‘extra’ ballots in 2026 cycle 

Using the National Association of Election Officials’ “Electionline” project, which collects news articles on various topics related to elections, we found at least 10 reports across eight states of voters receiving more than one ballot ahead of the 2026 midterms where election officials did not intend to send the extra ballot.

• Local media in California reported on Oct. 24 that at least 15,000 voters in Fresno County could have received an extra ballot. The county’s registrar of voters, James Kus, reportedly said sending out extra ballots was a “common issue” that often happened after voters updated their information on the voting register. 
• In Tulare County, California, 7,791 voters received an extra ballot. Officials said this was due to a vendor error.
• Local media in Kane County, Illinois, on the outskirts of Chicago, reported that elections officials had sent “about 2,000” extra ballots to voters due to “processing issues” with the clerk’s ballot-printing machine.
• In Athens-Clarke County, Georgia, 1,154 voters received extra ballots as a result of “an error in a mailing list.” 
• More than 600 voters in Warren County, Iowa, reportedly received an extra ballot. Election officials had not given a reason why at the time of this writing.
• Officials in Weber County, Utah, reportedly sent up to 167 voters an extra ballot due to a “miscalibrated envelope stuffing machine.”
• Officials in Imperial County, California, said around 160 voters were affected by a “mailing error” that issued them an extra ballot.
• Local media in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, reported that due to “a communication issue between the county and state while files were prepared,” 157 voters received an extra ballot.
• Election officials in Pueblo County, Colorado, said that some homeowners received more than one ballot to vote on a special tax issue. Officials said anyone who received more than one ballot should call the elections office as they may not have received them in error.
• Officials in Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin, said Oct. 27 that some voters may have received extra ballots due to an error by a village employee helping to prepare absentee ballots.

While the instances of officials sending extra ballots to voters recorded above were almost all the result of mistakes, there were also legitimate reasons why a voter might receive an extra ballot. 

For example, Patrick said that election officials might send out a second ballot if the first contained a mistake. She said it was then up to election officials “to make sure that the security protocols are there and are followed” so voters who received more than one ballot got only one vote.

‘Extra’ ballot does not mean extra vote

In all the cases above, officials emphasized that safeguards during the vote-counting process mean that just because a voter received an extra ballot did not mean they got an extra vote. 

For example, the elections-focused nonprofit news organization Votebeat reported in May that election officials in Wisconsin and other states print individual barcodes on ballots that tie them to a particular voter. If an official scans a barcode tied to a voter who has already voted, the vote-counting system will reject the second ballot. 

In Pennsylvania, Westmoreland County Commissioner Doug Chew reportedly told the Latrobe Bulletin that officials would use a barcode system to ensure that their vote-counting system would reject a potential second ballot from the same voter.

Patrick told Snopes that other protections such as signature verification keep voters from submitting an absentee ballot and also voting in person. Election officials use those same protections to ensure that the system counts only one absentee ballot per person.

In addition to barcodes and signature verification, Patrick said the ballots themselves were very specific and individualized, meaning fraudulent attempts to mass-copy ballots and sway elections would be extremely difficult to pull off. She said:

The ballots themselves have pretty specific card stock, they have very specific timing marks down the side that allow for them to be tabulated. It’s not the case that there’s one ballot that everybody gets. In Maricopa County, they literally have upwards of 10,000 different ballot styles. So, knowing which ballot style each individual voter gets is tied to the ballot style, it’s very specific, so even if you were to go out and take your sample ballot and duplicate it somehow, it doesn’t matter, that’s not an official ballot, it’s not going to go through the tabulator. It’s never going to get to that point in the process because it has to first be authenticated before it even makes it that far into the building.

Aside from ballots being difficult to copy, adding a significant number of ballots to a count would not go unnoticed. As part of the election certification process, officials will canvass — meaning count — absentee ballots and compare them with the known number of voters. A significantly higher number of returned ballots than voters would raise the alarm on fraud.

Patrick warned against automatically assuming election fraud if one person turned in multiple ballots at a polling station or drop box. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, at least 35 states allowed voters to nominate a person other than themselves to turn in their ballot, meaning some voters might legitimately hand in more than one ballot.

Engage with system to quell concerns, expert says

Despite there being no documented incidents of election fraud via illegal ballot duplication, prominent politicians such as U.S. President Donald Trump have shared the unproven theory. However, as we outlined above, election officials have multiple safeguards in place that are effective at ensuring that any one voter gets only one vote.

Patrick suggested that the best thing worried voters could do was to engage with the system.

It’s important to understand all the safeguards that are in place all along the path. To talk to your neighbors that work at the elections office, or who are poll workers. To go down and take a tour the next time there is a town hall and ask questions and see how it actually works.

She said, “When you have questions, elections officials are there with the answers and they want you to understand your process and your elections and to have confidence in it,” but added that voters should not “try and ‘test the system'” by submitting more than one ballot if they received multiple, “because that’s criminal and you’ll get caught, so you don’t want to do that!”

For further reading, Snopes has covered a number of claims related to the 2026 elections.

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