During the November 2020 midterm election in Nashville, Tennessee, there were issues with the voter lists that resulted in more than 430 voters casting ballots in the wrong races, according to a report from The Associated Press.
According to a statement by state Elections Coordinator Mark Goins, “human error” was the main cause of the problem.
Nashville election officials made updates to the voter files after the city’s IT GIS division had used geocoding, a computerized process to compare voter addresses to new district boundaries.
However, they did not verify the changes through a final round of geocoding, which resulted in more than 3,000 voters being assigned to the incorrect districts.
Many of these voters cast wrong ballots before the issue was detected.
Although the errors were significant, the report concluded that they did not impact the outcome of any of the affected races.
Goins recommended that counties with their own GIS resources should use them to validate their data and have them validated by the state comptroller’s geocoding to ensure accuracy.
