CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA (CVILLE RIGHT NOW) – The Albemarle County voter registrar’s office has fixed a postage problem that occurred with 700-800 of the 6,800 ballot packets it mailed out Sept. 18, the first day of early voting, Registrar Jonell McFadden told Cville Right Now. McFadden said voters alerted her office to the error, because their packets included return enveloped that didn’t have the metered stamp for the return postage.

“We mailed the ballots on Sept. 18 which was a Friday and we started hearing about this on that followed Wednesday, and so we got reports from two voters who didn’t have it so we said ‘Let’s see what’s happening here,'” McFadden told Cville Right Now. “So, for the affected precincts, we sent a brief letter of explanation along with the return envelope complete with the required postage they should have gotten the first time. We did that the following Wednesday and Thursday.”

McFadden said only new return envelopes, not second ballots, were mailed to impacted voters.

McFadden said her office is handling the packing of the mail-in ballots themselves for this election, instead of farming that work out to a vendor that had been doing it for years.

“It comes along with our effort to make our elections local. We believe we need to do the hard work of local elections,” McFadden said. “So, when we make a mistake, we mitigate it and rectify it as quickly as we find out. We also know we can’t make the same mistake over and over again.”

McFadden said there’s no evidence the mistake has affected the rate ballots have been returned to her office as they received around 1,500, which was close to the number back in the heavy early turnout in the April referendum.

She said the post office also had been delivering the ballots even if they didn’t have the proper postage. McFadden said 5,509 Albemarle residents had voted early through all methods as of Friday morning, which represents 6% of eligible voters in the county.

The Virginia Public Access Project reported as of Oct. 1, 313,567 Virginians had voted early, which more than doubles 150,217 who had voted at the same time in the 2022 midterms.