ZIP code ballot glitch sends message: Details matter

What a difference a digit makes. Workers at the Mahoning County Board of Elections and the Youngstown Post Office know only too well the anguish and confusion one errant integer can create.

That’s because a recent snafu caused thousands of requests for absentee ballots in the county to be mailed to the elections board – with the wrong address.

The address was close – but not close enough. The return envelopes provided by the Ohio Secretary of State’s office to the county’s 168,755 registered voters contained an incorrect ZIP code for the board’s offices inside Oakhill Renaissance Place on Youngstown’s South Side.

The envelopes read 44512, but the correct Zoning Improvement Plan code for the elections board is 44502. As a result, many requests were returned to frustrated senders.

The source of the glitch is under dispute. The secretary of state’s office claims all information for the ballot requests originated with each county elections board.

But Joyce Kale-Pesta, director of the Mahoning County elections board, vows that all information it sent to Columbus for the ballot requests was correct. She hypothesizes that perhaps the company in charge of printing the envelopes made the error.

Lacking any clear-cut evidence as to who or what was at fault, we’ll desist in playing any blame game and chalk up the snafu to human error somewhere along the chain.

LESSONS FROM GLITCH

Nonetheless, we hope that all parties at the state and county levels learn from this embarrassing blunder and put safeguards in place to avoid any repeat.

After all, the misdirected and returned applications for absentee ballots produced their fair share of waste in time and resources.

We’d hope in the future an extra layer of quality control and accuracy-checking be added at the county board and state agency to avoid a repeat of this blooper.

The faux pas is all the more consequential because it disrupted the process of ensuring free and unfettered access to voting for all, including those who cannot make it to the polls Nov. 6 or any of the early-voting dates at Oakhill Renaissance Place.

To their credit, the board of elections, the secretary of state’s office and the downtown Youngstown Post Office are working cooperatively to ensure all requests for ballots get into the hands of their addressees. Elections board workers are gathering the ballot requests daily at the main post office.

Nonetheless, we would encourage anyone worried about whether their application made it to its intended destination to call the Board of Elections at 330-783-2474 or stop by its offices at 345 Oak Hill Ave.

From a broader perspective, this pre-election glitch should serve as a cogent reminder to everyone that attention to details should never get short shrift.

Just with ZIP codes alone, of which there are more than 42,000 in the U.S., one wrong numeral in the five-digit mix can undermine the 55-year-old code’s primary purpose – zippy delivery.

The glitch also serves as a reminder that in virtually all aspects of our ever increasing rapid-paced digital world, minor details can have major consequences.