Susanne Cervenka

Asbury Park (N.J.) Press

FREEHOLD, N.J. — Vote-by-mail ballots are being returned to voters in at least one New Jersey county for the second election in a row, and some are worried that votes ultimately will go uncounted.

A design flaw in the envelopes that the Monmouth County Clerk's Office distributed is causing problems with postal machines' ability to read the destination address, said Ray Daiutolo, U.S. Postal Service spokesman for southern New Jersey.

It's also happening in some other New Jersey counties, said County Clerk Christine Giordano Hanlon, whose office oversees mailing and preparation of the ballots that are sent to the Monmouth County Board of Election.

"Suppose they (voters) are going out of town, and they are not going to be available," said Karl Crudut, a Neptune, N.J., resident who found vote-by-mail ballot back in his mailbox. "Those ballots are going to be sitting in the mailbox when they get home."

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It was not immediately known how many ballots were affected nor how many mail-in ballots Monmouth County voters had requested.

The county has nearly 440,000 registered voters, according to voter-registration data released Tuesday from the New Jersey Division of Elections. Almost half have not declared a political party and are registered as unaffiliated.

Postal service machines scan for bar codes that contain the delivery address, Daiutolo said. No bar code for the delivery address is present on the envelope for the official mail-in ballot.

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When the machines can't find a bar code, they scan for a printed address. But in this case, the machines at times are reading the voter's address, he said.

The voter's address also contains a county Board of Election bar code that election officials use to track which ballots are returned.

In recent days, the postal service alerted its staff to the problem and have been setting the mail-in ballots aside to be sent to the election board rather than returning them to the sender, Daiutolo said. Voters who receive the ballots they already had mailed can mail them again without additional postage.

Early voting or absentee voting already has begun in more than a half dozen states, including Iowa, Maine, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Jersey, Ohio and Vermont, according to Vote.org. And in swing states, more than 40% of voters will have cast their ballots before Election Day, the Clinton campaign told The New York Times.

Hunterdon County, on the western edge of the state about 60 miles from New York City, also had some vote-by-mail envelope problems. In this case, the return address was on the back, but the envelope had no indication which side was the front — reminiscent of problems that Monmouth County had for its June primary ballots.

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Hunterdon County's problem was corrected, and ballots sent out after Oct. 6 have the correct marking for the postal machines, said George Flood, the U.S. Postal Service spokesman who represents the northern part of the state.

Patricia Caravaglio of Hazlet, N.J., who also had her ballot returned to her, said the situation still bothers her.

"The big concern for me is not only me," she said. She's worried about people who might have their ballots returned who don't know how to proceed. "The bottom line is whoever wins is fine with me as long as it is done correctly."

Follow Susanne Cervenka on Twitter: @scervenka