Subheadline: The Election Commission says a "processing omission" left four of six special judicial races, and a county charter referendum, off ballots already mailed to voters. Replacement ballots are supposed to arrive by Wednesday. If you voted absentee, check your ballot now.
MEMPHIS, Tenn. - About 700 Shelby County voters who requested absentee ballots received ones with races missing from them, the Shelby County Election Commission acknowledged in a notice posted Saturday, July 11.
Most of the affected ballots left off the countywide special election races for Circuit Court, Chancery Court, and Criminal Court judges. A smaller number omitted a referendum question on amending the county charter. There are six special judicial races on the August 6 ballot. Four of them are missing from the roughly 700 ballots.
The commission attributed the error to a "processing omission."
Supplemental ballots containing the omitted races are now being mailed to affected voters by tracked FedEx delivery and are expected to arrive by Wednesday, July 15. The commission also says it plans to call every affected voter for whom it has a phone number.
Voters who requested an absentee ballot and want to confirm whether they were affected can call the Election Commission at 901-222-1200.
The timing is tight. Early voting begins Friday, July 17. Election Day for the county general election and the federal and state primaries is August 6.
The races left off the ballots are not minor. The judicial vacancies at issue are currently filled by appointment, and those appointments hold only until the results of the special elections are certified after August 6. In other words, these are the elections that decide whether appointed judges keep their seats. The charter referendum asks voters to change the county''s governing document.
Why It Matters for Memphis
An absentee ballot is the vote of someone who, by definition, is not going to show up in person. Older voters, disabled voters, voters who are out of the county, voters who cannot take time off work. They asked for a ballot precisely because they could not get to a polling place, and the government sent them an incomplete one.
The commission is fixing it, and the fix appears reasonable: tracked replacement ballots, phone calls to those it can reach. But the burden of the fix now sits partly on the voter. Someone has to open a second envelope, understand what happened, and complete and return it in time. Voters who moved, who do not answer unknown numbers, or who assume they already voted may never realize four judicial races were missing from their ballot.
The margin in a low-turnout special judicial election can be small. Seven hundred ballots is not a rounding error.
The Oversight Question
Every election office makes mistakes. The measure of one is what it does when it catches them, and whether it tells the public the whole truth about what went wrong.
So far, Shelby County voters have been given a two-word explanation: processing omission. That is a description of an outcome, not a cause. It does not say who proofed the ballot, what step failed, or whether the same failure could have touched in-person ballots or the machines. Early voting opens in five days. The public is entitled to know the answer before it votes, not in a report issued after the results are certified.
