A printer’s error has sparked controversy in a Wellington Village Council election, after 170 voters were wrongly informed that one of the candidates had dropped out.
The notice inserted in vote-by-mail ballots that arrived in recent days informed people that two Village Council candidates had withdrawn and votes for them wouldn’t count.
The message was incorrect. One candidate did, in fact, drop out, and votes for him won’t count. The other candidate is still in the race, and votes for her will be counted.
“There definitely was an error,” Supervisor of Elections Wendy Sartory Link said in a phone interview Tuesday. She said it was a human error made by the printer her office uses and the mistake was missed by one of her employees. Link said her office takes responsibility.
The candidate in question, Lauren Brody, said Tuesday she was greatly troubled by what happened. After speaking with Link, Brody is skeptical about the election supervisor’s explanation.
“It’s a little hard to trust somebody that — whether it was on purpose or not — has sabotaged” her campaign, Brody said in a phone interview.
“This is a very, very big deal. This is an election, and the election has been tampered with. I don’t think it matters if it is a local Village of Wellington election or a presidential election,” she said. “Here I am killing myself for this campaign, doing everything I can for the people of Wellington, only for the Supervisor of Elections Office to kneecap me.”
In a social media post, Brody wrote that she “will be doing EVERYTHING IN MY POWER to get to the bottom of WHO made this ‘mistake’ and why.”
Link said it was a mistake, and not anything nefarious. “There is no fraud. There is no conspiracy. There is none of that. This was a human error, made by our printer, and we didn’t catch it.”
“This is human error that we are doing everything that we can to rectify it, and we believe that by the time we are done the candidate will not be harmed and we will reach out to every voter,” Link said.
One of four candidates listed on the ballot, Paulo Santana, dropped out of the race — after the deadline for his name to be removed from the ballot and after the initial round of vote-by-mail ballots for the March 10 election were sent out by the Elections Office, Link said.
Once it was notified Santana had dropped out, Link said her office prepared a standard inset according to state guidelines that explains a candidate had withdrawn and that votes for Santana would not be counted.
The draft notice listed the other three candidates — Brody, Stephen Levin, Joshua “Josh” Zillmer — and said votes for them would count.
At the printer, Link said, the word “not” was added to the line that listed Brody, telling people that votes for her wouldn’t count. When a proof was sent to the elections office, Link said an employee looked only at the line involving Santana, who had dropped out, and not at what it said about Brody.
Instead of using what the elections office prepared, Link said “the printer retyped it (and) didn’t tell us that they were retyping it. … We thought they were just printing what we sent them.”
Brody doesn’t accept that account. “The explanation is difficult to buy, because a printer doesn’t generally change words. I feel that my chances of winning the lottery are better than the chances of adding a word that would dramatically have changed the meaning of that sentence,” she said.
The inserts were added to 170 vote-by-mail ballots the Elections Office sent to Wellington voters on Feb. 3, 4, and 5.
When Link learned Monday afternoon what happened, “We came up with a plan and how to rectify it and to cause the candidate the least amount of inconvenience or confusion.”
Link said employees began contacting every voter who’d received a ballot, by phone, text or email. She said two or three voters of the 170 voters who didn’t have a phone number or email address on file would get first-class letters.
Any voter who already marked a ballot and wanted a new one, in case the error affected their vote, will get one, Link said. Any ballot that comes back from one of the 170 voters that the elections office hasn’t been able to contact will be held out and not tabulated to give a voter more time until the March 10 election to receive and submit a new ballot.
So far, Link said, employees had reached dozens of voters. None said it affected their votes, and Link said most were grateful for the outreach.
Link and Brody said they had spoken to each other. Brody said she was not satisfied.
The number of voters who got the incorrect notice is relatively small, less than one half of 1% of the village’s registered voters.
Local government elections are marked by low turnout.
There were two Wellington Village Council Elections in 2024, with 7,373 voters in one contest and 7,290 participating in the other. First and second place were separated by 60 votes, or 1.2 percentage points, in one race, and by 33 votes, or 0.5 percentage points, in the other.
Brody said she’s suffered irreparable harm because voters have seen pictures of the incorrect notice on social media posts. She acknowledged it could have the opposite effect, with the incident giving her name and campaign more attention. Brody said there’s no way to know for sure.
She said she has requested government records of all communications about the ballot notice; wants Link’s office to contact every voter in Wellington, not just those who received the incorrect notice; thinks there needs to be “a full audit and investigation” and that “certainly the governor’s office needs to know what happened.”
A first-time candidate for office who’s lived in the village for eight years, she said the experience has been trying.
Brody said she first learned about the notice from a social media post Monday that said “a vote for Lauren Brody does not count. And I almost fainted when I saw that. I did a double take and a triple take and then the phone began to ring and ring.”
Political writer Anthony Man can be reached at aman@sunsentinel.com and can be found @browardpolitics on Bluesky, Threads, Facebook and Mastodon.