SALT LAKE COUNTY — If you haven’t received your ballot in Salt Lake County, yet, the County Clerk’s Office says you’ll get it soon. They say there was a problem with the Washington-based printing company that caused a delay in mailing out some ballots.
County officials say they know what the problem was, but, they’re not sure why it happened.
Clerk Sherrie Swensen says they have a contract with K&H printers in Washington to make and mail out the ballots and envelopes to voters in Salt Lake County. Swensen says they ordered more envelopes than ballots because they like to have extras if they need. However, she claims the printers ran out of the envelopes they had ordered.
“That’s where it doesn’t make sense that they were out of envelopes. We actually paid the invoice for 560,000 [envelopes],” Swensen says.
The office purchased 514 thousand ballots, so Swensen says she’s not sure why the shortage happened.
“That’s 46,000 more envelopes than we actually ordered ballots for, but, they said they would have to look into that when they have more time,” she says.
She doesn’t have a specific number of ballots that were affected, but what has Swensen especially concerned is how long it took the printers to inform her of the problem. The process of mailing out the ballots was delayed for a few days.
She adds, “Even though they had said they had run short on the 15th, we didn’t find out until the afternoon of the 19th.”
However, Swensen says she has spoken with officials from the printing company, and the problem has been resolved. They agreed to send each ballot out as quickly as possible, then they’ll figure out what went wrong. Still, plenty of people have been emailing her, asking where the ballots are.
“I’ve been explaining that to [citizens] is that there was a shortage of envelopes and that [the printers] promised us everything had been sent out last week,” Swensen said.