Marion County elections supervisor corrects mismatched ballots

LAKE MARY, Fla. - The Marion County Supervisor of Elections said he will count a provisional ballot after a mixup.

Brian Ellis was surprised when he went to vote at the elections office in Ocala, Monday. A poll worker told him someone already cast a ballot under his name, which prompted concern.

“I came down here today, presented my driver’s license to the poll worker and she indicated after looking through her records that she thought I already voted south of here in Bellview,’ he said.

It turns out, someone did vote in Ellis’s place. A person with an almost identical name and same birth date.

“I have not run across this particular situation,” said Wesley Wilcox, the Marion County elections supervisor. “Same last name, same date of birth, first name and middle name on the other gentlemen were the exact same, spelled the same way and everything. So when you looked them by date of birth, their records were going to be right next to each other, and unfortunately, my operator picked the wrong one.”

The office was able to transfer the other Mr. Ellis’s vote to the correct record. Brian had to fill out a provisional ballot, which Wilcox said will be reviewed by the board and counted on Thursday.

Wilcox said Brian did the right thing by filling out the provisional ballot and informing the office. He said this situation is extremely rare.

This is a very minute anomaly. This does not happen. This is the first one of this situation that I’ve seen, and we’ve processed over 115,000 people just in this election,” Wilcox said.