Ocean Elections Board Resumes After Worker's COVID-19 Positive

TOMS RIVER, NJ — Two hundred Ocean County employees have been tested for the coronavirus after a worker at the Ocean County Board of Elections tested positive for the virus, Ocean County Administrator Carl Block said.

The employee had notified her supervisor that her mother had tested positive for the virus, and was told to get tested, Block said. When the employee's result came back positive, the Board of Elections sent all of its workers home early on Monday and shut the offices down for a deep cleaning on Tuesday. Workers returned to work on Wednesday, he said.

"You just can't take any chances," Block said, adding that all three floors at 129 Hooper Ave., where the Board of Elections operates, were cleaned.

Before the shutdown, which happened about 4 p.m. Monday, the elections board had been able to mail out 600 "cure" letters to voters whose mail-in ballots had issues that were preventing them from being validated. Those issues include signatures that didn't match ones in voter records, signatures not in the proper locations and similar technical items, Block said.

Voters receiving the cure letters have until 4 p.m. on Nov. 18 to respond to the letter and correct the issue so their vote will be accepted, following the instructions in the letter.

Block said the county was caught up on all of the mail-in ballots it had received before the shutdown happened, which is why the unofficial vote totals had not been updated since Saturday evening on the county's election results website. The elections staff has counted more than 325,000 ballots so far.

Out of an abundance of caution and because of Centers for Disease Control guidelines about potential exposure, the county offered instant tests to any employee who had been working in the Board of Elections.

Two hundred employees — which included temporary employees and employees from other departments who were pulled over to help with the crush of processing the mail-in ballots — took the tests. Two additional employees have tested positive for the coronavirus, he said.

On Wednesday when employees returned to the election board for work, instant tests were performed again and as of 11:30 a.m. there had been no positive results, Block said. All of the employees are being sent to the Ocean County College test site for follow-up testing to confirm the negative results.

"It's a matter of utmost precaution," he said. "They have to certify the election next week. We can't afford to be quarantined for two weeks."

Block said he had informed the Ocean County Board of Freeholders of the issues at Tuesday's pre-board meeting.

Now that the elections board workers have returned, they are processing any mail-in ballots that had arrived by 8 p.m. on Tuesday, and have started working on provisional ballots, which could not be addressed until elections officials could confirm voters had not submitted mail-in ballots, Block said.

He did not have an estimate of how many provisional ballots had to be processed.

Block said the number of mail-in ballots submitted through the drop boxes around the county outnumbered ballots mailed through the U.S. Postal Service 2-to-1.

"We were emptying the drop boxes twice a day," he said, and the county added boxes in the towns receiving the most, including Brick and Toms River.

In addition, people lined up and hand-delivered their ballots to the Board of Elections.

"Every day there was a line outside the Board of Elections," he said. "They were taking in a thousand ballots a day over the counter."

Block also clarified what voters should expect to see when they track their ballots through the state elections website.

"It's not like Amazon," he said. The bar code on the ballots were scanned when the ballots were sent out, and scanned again when the ballots were received at the Board of Elections. The status of whether it was accepted or rejected will not be updated until the final results are certified. The deadline for that is Nov. 20.

"A voter's ballot status won’t be changed to 'Accepted' or 'Rejected' until after the certification of the election, on Nov. 20," the state ballot tracking webpage notes.

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