APPLETON, Wis. —  Blame the seventh box from the right bottom edge.

That’s the one with the little mark that’s causing county officials to take a unique course of action in counting an as-of-yet undetermined number of absentee ballots.

The box is part of the system that makes ballots readable to the optical scanners used to tally up votes. A small scratch in that one box makes the ballots unreadable. But county officials say they have a workaround they believe is covered under state statues.

“Whenever a ballot is unable to be read by the electronic tabulating device the statutory procedure is to duplicate each affected ballot,” said Outagamie County Deputy Corporation Counsel Kyle Sargent. “That process consists of an election inspector — or actually election inspectors — transferring the votes from the unreadable ballot to a readable ballot which can then be processed by the tabulating device.”

Like just about everything in 2020, it’s this is shaping up to be a unique circumstance.

“Frankly, I haven’t seen anything like it and we’ve done quite a bit of research over the last week in trying to find an analogous situation where we could say, ‘This is the legal precedent for this.’ There is none at this point. ” Sargent said. “At least not in Wisconsin.”

Outagamie County Clerk Lori O’Bright said the issue is confined to several thousand absentee ballots and will not affect ballots handed out for in-person voting.

She assures those voting absentee their votes will be counted.

“Your vote will be counted. No action by any voter in Outagamie County, the City of Appleton or the Village of Harrison is required to address this issue,” she said. “Their vote will be counted as they tabulated it. It just might have to be remade by two inspectors to ensure the equipment can read it.”

And the cause of the little white mark on the the seventh box from the right bottom edge?

The printer says it was a small tear or depression in a component of the printing process.​