Fresno County Ballot Machines Print Wrong School District Name on Three Trustee Races — Photo: KOMUnews — CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Fresno County Ballot Machines Print Wrong School District Name on Three Trustee Races
Voters casting ballots at Fresno County vote centers this week are seeing a startling mistake on their printed ballots: the paper reads “Fowler Unified School District” where it should say “Fresno Unified School District.” The error affects three school board races — Fresno Unified Trustee Areas 1, 3, and 4 — and appears only on ballots printed by the county’s electronic ballot-marking devices, not on mail-in ballots or ballots printed on demand.
Fresno County Clerk and Registrar of Voters James A. Kus says the mistake won’t change how votes are counted. The ballot-marking machines show the correct race title on screen when a voter makes their selection, and the vote is recorded in the correct Fresno Unified contest when tabulated, despite the wrong name printed on the paper. No other races on the ballot are affected.
The county cannot fix the printing error at this point. Signs explaining the mistake are being posted at all ballot-marking devices, and voters in the three affected trustee areas may request a ballot printed on demand at any vote center instead of using a ballot-marking machine. Those on-demand ballots do not show the error.
Kus apologized for “any confusion or inconvenience” the error may cause and directed voters with questions to contact the Fresno County Elections Department.
After Election Day, the county will audit additional precincts in each of the three affected areas. Kus also said the county will add another manual proofing step for ballots printed by ballot-marking devices in future elections, “in addition to the extensive proofing already applied to all ballots designed for hand marking every election.”
The Breakdown
- The error appears only when a voter uses an electronic ballot-marking device at a vote center. The screen shows “Fresno Unified School District” correctly, but the printed ballot says “Fowler Unified School District.”
- Three races are affected: Fresno Unified School District Trustee Areas 1, 3, and 4.
- The county says votes are still recorded and counted in the correct Fresno Unified contests, and no other races are affected.
- Mail-in ballots and ballots printed on demand at vote centers do not show the error.
- The county will audit additional precincts in the three affected areas after Election Day and add another proofing step for future elections.
What This Means for You
If you live in Fresno Unified Trustee Area 1, 3, or 4 and vote in person at a vote center, the ballot you receive from a ballot-marking machine may list the wrong school district name — but your vote will still count in the correct Fresno Unified race. You can avoid the misprint entirely by requesting a ballot printed on demand at any vote center instead of using a ballot-marking machine.
This error affects your ability to trust that the ballot in your hand accurately reflects the race you’re voting in. The county’s assurance that votes are counted correctly rests on the internal workings of the tabulation system, which voters cannot see for themselves when the paper in front of them says something different. The audit after Election Day is the backstop that tests whether that assurance holds — whether the votes recorded match the votes intended, despite the printing error.
What You Can Do
If you live in Fresno Unified Trustee Area 1, 3, or 4 and plan to vote in person, you can request a ballot printed on demand at any vote center rather than using a ballot-marking device. Those on-demand ballots do not show the error. If you have questions about the error or how your vote will be counted, contact the Fresno County Elections Department.
What to Watch
The county says votes are recorded correctly despite the wrong name printed on the ballot. That claim depends entirely on the internal operation of the ballot-marking and tabulation systems — voters cannot verify it themselves when the paper they hold says one thing and they’re told the machine did another. The audit of additional precincts in Areas 1, 3, and 4 after Election Day is the test of whether that assurance is accurate. What would confirm it: the audit results, published by the county, showing that the votes recorded in Fresno Unified contests match the number of voters who intended to vote in those contests, with no votes mistakenly counted in Fowler Unified races.
Why did this error make it through the county’s proofing process in the first place? The county says it applies “extensive proofing” to all hand-marked ballots and will now add another manual proofing step for ballots printed by ballot-marking devices — which raises the question of what proofing was applied to those ballots before this error was caught. The material does not say how the error was discovered, how long it went undetected, or how many voters have already cast ballots with the wrong district name printed on them. What would answer this: the county’s timeline of when the error was introduced, when it was discovered, and how many ballots were affected before voters were notified.
A separate earlier incident, mentioned in one source but not directly part of this printing error, involved 295 Fresno County voters receiving incorrect ballots after about 1,000 addresses were updated and voters were inadvertently assigned to the wrong precinct. The county attributed that episode to “human decisions” rather than system malfunction. That history — voters receiving the wrong ballot, votes that cannot be identified or changed once cast — is the backdrop against which this printing error lands. How confident should a voter be that the county’s systems catch errors before they reach the ballot box, rather than after?
