Ballot shortages are rare in U.S. elections, but here's why they sometimes happen
Earlier this month, ballot shortages at a few polling locations in a Mississippi county caused some serious issues for voters.
Such shortages are rare in U.S. elections, but they do occur on occasion. The shortages in Mississippi — along with instances in Ohio this month and in Texas last year — point to the difficulty election officials sometimes have in determining how many ballots to have ready.
What happened in Mississippi
Mississippi has historically had some of the lowest voter participation rates in the nation. But ahead of a competitive gubernatorial election this year, activists from across the state got to work mobilizing voters.
Harya Tarekegn, the director of policy and advocacy at the Mississippi Center for Justice, says there was a particular effort made to engage with voters in Hinds County, the state's most populous and a predominantly Black county.
"There was a lot of canvassing done, a lot of community education around specific issues," she says. "But also there were a lot of efforts to drive people to the polls to make voting easier, to increase access in that way."
Mobilization efforts worked. Tarekegn says there was a surge in voter turnout on Election Day, particularly in Hinds County. Unfortunately, she says, election officials weren't prepared.
She says around midday she and other voting rights advocates started getting calls from a large network of poll monitors they had set up across Mississippi.
"We started getting calls about polling locations running out of ballots," Tarekegn says. "Some locations had already run out of ballots by the time a poll monitor called us and some we got calls where, you know, they had 14 ballots left, but 100 people in line."
Tarekegn says there was a scramble to make sure those polling sites got additional ballots. She says in some cases, it took up to two hours. And when some sites did finally get ballots, they didn't get nearly enough. And these ballot shortages, Tarekegn says, led to some extremely long lines.
"We can say for certain that there were individuals who walked away from the lines because of how long they were," she says.
There is still no clarity on what exactly happened to cause the ballot shortages in Hinds County. Mississippi Secretary of State Michael Watson said in a statement following reports of shortages that counties are required to print ballots for a minimum of 60% of active voters.
At least one Hinds County official told local media that they did not anticipate such a high turnout for the election. (This is also not the first time Hinds County has dealt with ballot shortages.)
It's an "inexact science" to figure out how many ballots are needed
David Becker, executive director and founder of the nonpartisan nonprofit Center for Election Innovation and Research, says occasional shortages are why election officials are usually really careful when they are trying to figure out how many ballots to print.
"When counties, especially counties that have to preprint ballots, have to plan for the next election, it's an inexact science," Becker says. "They're doing this based on past turnout in similar elections, and they want to get it right. They want to have enough ballots so that they don't run out. But on the other hand, they don't want to print so many ballots that they've spent way too much money and had extra ballots at the end."
This also is true of counties that don't need to preprint ballots. In Hays County, Texas, there is a vote center system that prints an individualized ballot once a voter shows up and gives their address. But Election Administrator Jennifer Doinoff says they still have to estimate how many blank ballots and other materials they will need.
"We look at past like elections as well as immediate past year elections to see what our voter turnout was and, you know, what our voter registration population was so that we can try to determine how many supplies that we might need," Doinoff says. "And we always go a little bit more above."
