A printing error sent 7,791 Tulare County voters a second vote-by-mail ballot for the Nov. 3 midterm election. Recipients began calling or visiting the registrar of voters' office in Visalia during mid-October, concerned that having two ballots might make them appear to be voting twice. The mistake was not evidence of fraud, but the incident was quickly recast as a fraud claim on conservative social media.
A Vendor's Reprinting Mistake Spirals
The Los Angeles Times reported that an error by Tulare County's longtime private printing vendor, ProVote Solutions, led 7,791 voters to receive extra ballots. Registrar of Voters Michelle Baldwin said her office responded within 24 hours, and election staff contacted the vendor after residents began reporting duplicates. ProVote, based in Porterville, confirmed on the evening of October 13 that nearly 7,800 ballots had been reprinted and mailed. The company accepted responsibility; it did not immediately respond to a request for comment, the Times reported.
The error was confined to the City of Tulare: all 7,791 duplicate ballots went there, affecting about 23 percent of its 34,500 registered voters, The Sun-Gazette reported. That represents about 3 percent of Tulare County's 227,000 registered voters, according to the Times. The reprinting occurred during a routine ballot replacement procedure. ProVote printed postcards in English and Spanish telling recipients to securely destroy the extra ballot, then drove them more than three hours to a postal facility in Sacramento to speed delivery, the Times reported. The company says it has produced more than 35 million ballots for 42 counties nationwide and holds 23 security patents, including technology that embeds hidden print-source identifiers in ballot paper.
Why A Second Ballot Doesn't Mean A Second Vote
Baldwin told the Times that safeguards would flag anyone who tried to submit two ballots. Every mail-return envelope barcode is tied to a voter's individual record, and elections staff scan that barcode and log receipt before a ballot can even be accepted for counting, checking the envelope signature against the signature on file and confirming the voter hasn't already cast a ballot. Tulare County elections staff said a verified ballot is separated from its envelope before counting, so the barcode only tracks that a ballot was returned — never how someone voted — and mail ballots remain private once that separation happens.
The California Secretary of State's election integrity guidance describes statewide safeguards intended to prevent a voter from having more than one ballot counted. State regulations under Title 2, Section 20960 of the California Code of Regulations also require officials to compare every vote-by-mail envelope signature against the registration record, while barring staff from weighing party, race, or ethnicity in that review.
A Second, Smaller Error In Imperial County
A separate incident involved 160 Imperial County voters with confidential status who received duplicate ballots in a mailing error, the Los Angeles Times reported. County officials said the mistake arose as procedures were updated to comply with a California law that took effect January 1, 2026, making elected officials and candidates eligible for confidential voter status for the first time. The county said the duplicate mailing occurred during that procedural update.
How returned ballots are checked
For a returned vote-by-mail ballot, the California Secretary of State says county officials compare the signature on the return envelope with the signature in the voter’s registration record. Officials then separate the ballot from its envelope to preserve secrecy before tallying it, according to the California Secretary of State.
Vote-by-mail ballots accounted for 57.79% of all votes cast in California’s November 8, 2016, General Election, according to the California Secretary of State’s certification announcement.
David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research and a former senior trial attorney in the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, said elections are intentionally decentralized and built to withstand ordinary human error. He noted that voters sometimes end up with two ballots simply because they requested a replacement and then the original arrived anyway — a mundane explanation that rarely survives online. Becker said mistakes like Tulare's get magnified on social media and morph into conspiracy theories in a climate already thick with distrust.
How The Story Went Viral
The duplicate-ballot error in Tulare went viral in conservative social media circles almost immediately. Eric Daugherty posted claims criticizing mass mail-in voting and alleging cheating, and that post was viewed more than 450,000 times on X, according to the Times. The timing mattered: President Trump had attempted to restrict mail-in ballots ahead of the November election, only to have the U.S. Supreme Court block his proposed restrictions in September, and Trump has repeatedly alleged, without providing evidence, that mail voting leads to widespread cheating and fraud. Federal officials separately charged 28 people in California with election-related crimes on October 19, a tally unrelated to the Tulare printing error but part of the same tense backdrop.
California automatically mails a ballot to every registered voter, a policy shared by seven other states, and research from the California Voter Foundation shows nearly 90 percent of California voters now cast ballots by mail — a scale that makes printing and mailing security a front-line issue for county election offices. Statewide voting systems mark voters immediately once a ballot is cast, which is the backbone of the fraud-prevention checks officials point to when incidents like Tulare's surface.
Stakes In A Swing Congressional District
The politics around the error are sharpened by geography. Tulare, a city of 74,000, sits mostly within a county that is largely rural and has voted for Trump in the last three presidential elections, but the city itself falls partly within the competitive 22nd Congressional District, represented by Republican David Valadao and challenged by Democrat Randy Villegas, a political science professor at the College of the Sequoias in Visalia. Robert Jones, a strategist for the Valadao campaign, said the campaign maintained close communication with the registrar and was not overly concerned about the error. Villegas issued a statement expressing confidence in the election process, per the Times.
Mark Martinez, a political science professor at Cal State Bakersfield, said conspiracy theories stemming from errors like this one worsen an already tense political climate in the Central Valley. He added that the fallout can extend beyond politics itself, with some people avoiding political events altogether — particularly, he said, people who look Brown or Latino.
What Late Mail Voters Should Know
Separate from the duplicate-ballot confusion, Tulare County's elections office has flagged another wrinkle for anyone mailing a ballot close to the deadline. The California Secretary of State advises voters mailing a ballot on Election Day to obtain a hand-stamped postmark inside a post office, so those who wait until Election Day should go inside and request one to make sure it counts. For those who would rather skip the mail entirely, in 2026 vote-by-mail voters in 31 counties can bring their completed ballot to a participating local vote center, sign a roster under penalty of perjury, and feed it directly into an on-site scanner for same-day tabulation, according to the California Voter Foundation.
Whatever path a voter chooses, state law treats attempts to cast more than one ballot in the same election as a crime.
