Elections Defined Video Series
This series of short videos features NCSL Director of Elections and Redistricting Wendy Underhill talking about some of the key steps of election administration you may not have heard of—from ballot curing to voter list maintenance to what it means to be a poll worker, and everything in between. View the complete series.
Election professionals use the phrase ballot duplication to refer to a process for making sure even damaged ballots can be counted.
Let’s say the dog chewed on an absentee or mail ballot, or coffee was spilled on it. Whenever a ballot can’t be read by a vote-counting machine, bipartisan teams of poll workers replicate a voter’s selections onto a blank ballot to ensure that the voter’s choices are recorded correctly and that the ballot can be counted.
Both the original and the duplicate ballots are preserved for future inspection just in case. Call it duplication, replication or even reproduction—remaking ballots guarantees that every valid vote is counted.
Ready for more election administration answers? View the complete series for information on the topics below. Still have questions? See NCSL’s Election Resources.
- Ballot Duplication.
- Ballot Collecting.
- Ballot Curing.
- Provisional Ballots.
- Pre-Processing Ballots.
- Poll Workers vs. Poll Watchers.
- Post-Election Audits.
- Canvassing and Certification.
- Results Reporting.
- Voter ID.
- Voter Registration List Maintenance.