NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Nashville election officials made erroneous updates to voter lists for last month’s election and failed to follow steps to make sure they were accurate, leading more than 430 Tennessee voters to cast ballots in the wrong races, the state’s elections coordinator determined in a review released Friday.
A report by state Elections Coordinator Mark Goins cited “human error” as a main cause of the problem in Nashville. The Davidson County Election Commission confirmed in the report that more than 3,000 voters were assigned to one or more of the incorrect districts. Hundreds cast wrong ballots before the issue was flagged.
The contests affected included state legislative races and congressional races, in which Republican state lawmakers had just carved the left-leaning city three ways during once-a-decade redistricting early this year, cutting in and out of some neighborhoods. Republicans ultimately succeeded in their map-drawing push to flip a Democratic seat, contributing to the GOP takeover of the U.S. House of Representatives.
The report determined that none of the errors were egregious enough to affect any of the races in which erroneous ballots were cast.
Goins’ report says the root cause of the issues was that Nashville election officials made updates to voter files after the city’s IT GIS division had used geocoding, a computerized process to compare voter addresses to new district boundaries. Geocoding can be done multiple times in the process, the report says, and the commission did not verify its changes through a final round of geocoding by the IT GIS division, which a commission staff member declined to have done in March after election officials had made thousands more manual edits.