COLUMBUS, Ohio — The Franklin County Board of Elections identified what caused 49.669 voters to receive the wrong absentee ballots and said the problem has been fixed.

“This is certainly not something that certainly we wanted to happen,” said Public Information Officer Aaron Sellers.

On Monday, the board of elections delivered more than 237,000 ballots to the post office. On Tuesday, they started getting calls from some voters alerting they were mailed the incorrect ballots.

“Once that happened, we began to start looking in and working with the vendor," said Sellers.

The software vendor, BlueCrest Inc. in Danbury, Connecticut, which Franklin County has worked with for nearly 10 years, told the board a function of one of its scanners was disabled the afternoon of Oct. 3.

“We don’t know how it was deactivated, and we’re certainly investigating that,” Sellers said.

BlueCrest said new safety measures are in place to make sure it does not happen again.

“The accuracy and security of the election process is of the utmost importance to both BlueCrest and the Franklin County Board of Elections,” BlueCrest said in a statement.

On Friday, the Franklin County Board of Elections said they will be mailing out the 49,669 replacement ballots within the next three days. 

Questions surrounding the accuracy and fairness of the election have been raised by officials at all levels of government including President Donald Trump. Sellers said since boards of elections are bipartisan; it would be difficult to imagine this was intentional.

“We’re elections officials. This is what we do for a living and we take an oath. The most important thing now to elicit voter confidence it is to get re-issued collected ballots to those affected voters,” he exclaimed.

Sellers said if anyone thinks they received a wrong ballot they may go to vote.franklincountyohio.gov. There, they may look at a sample ballot. In the top right corner, they may see if the city, ward, and precinct they live in are correct.

“You can match that with the sample ballot to see if it is correct and if it is not you ultimately will be getting a replacement ballot,” Sellers explained.

Wednesday, Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose issued a directive for the Franklin County Board of Elections to help voters get the correct ballots. 

The directive asks the county to create a process that would allow voters to report they have received an incorrect ballot. It also says the county must quickly replace them with the ballots voters requested. Replacement ballots that are returned in a timely manner will be counted. Residents who received the wrong ballot can also go to in-person to vote.

If you have any questions about the election, check out our voting guide here.