Anger, confusion over delay in delivery of Bellmawr sample ballots

It seemed simple: Take the sample ballots to the post office in Bellmawr and distribute them throughout the borough, just over three square miles in area.

Instead, the sample ballots for a once-defeated Bellmawr School District referendum began arriving a week later - after a trip to Newark, N.J., 80 miles north and angry phone calls from residents claiming a conspiracy.

The sample ballots were for a special second-chance vote Tuesday on authorizing the district to borrow $3.1 million to repair the roofs on two elementary schools and one middle school.

They needed to be mailed by noon the Wednesday before the election, said John Schmidt, a deputy in the Camden County Clerk's Office. The printer dropped off the mailings March 5, Schmidt said, at the South Jersey regional bulk mail center - in Bellmawr.

Another set of sample ballots, for a similar vote in Brooklawn, was dropped off at the same time and arrived without a hitch. But the Bellmawr ballots didn't arrive; by the end of the week, Schmidt said, his office began to worry.

"Thursday, we started getting a little concerned. Friday was, 'Really, where are these things? They've got to be coming,' " Schmidt said.

The clerk's office got in touch with Bellmawr and the U.S. Postal Service, and the news was startling: The sample ballots had left Bellmawr for Newark.

They eventually would return to Bellmawr, where, Schmidt said, they were passed through machinery twice Sunday, once at 1 p.m. and once at midnight, and then sent to a distribution facility in Camden.

But it wasn't over.

"Bellmawr did a lot of investigating [Monday] where these things were," Schmidt said, because mail for carriers is distributed from the Camden annex, not the Bellmawr post office.

But nothing necessarily went wrong, said Raymond Daiutolo, regional USPS spokesman. Sample ballots are bulk mailings, not first-class mail, he said, and the delivery window is two to nine days.

The trip to Newark, he said, could have been avoided, but it was not a mistake. A small number of the ballots were addressed to other states, Daiutolo said, so the mailings were placed in a "mixed tray." Had the majority of ballots, destined for local mailboxes, been placed in a local tray, they would never have left the county.

The USPS has talked to the printer, Daiutolo said, so such situations can be prevented by more proactive sorting and labeling.

The result of the vote was not expected until late Tuesday.