Dave Hardy, a Kanawha County commissioner, voted in the wrong delegate district in the primary. Hardy, who lives in Delegate District 35, was handed a ballot for Delegate District 36 when he went to vote early with his wife last week.
"I knew my precinct number had changed, and I thought that maybe I had been put in the 36th," Hardy said.
Hardy is one of the at least 10 early voters who voted in the wrong delegate district in the primary, according the Kanawha County Clerk's Office. That's because he's one of more than 277 voters in Charleston who were placed in a precinct that didn't match up with their delegate district prior to the election.
Hardy wasn't the first to notice.
Delegate Mike Pushkin, D-Kanawha, noticed when he was knocking on doors in his district, and he brought it to the county's attention on April 26.
"I don't think this was done intentionally," Pushkin said. "And I think that a mistake was made and I wanted to bring it to the county's attention."
Pushkin is among the delegate candidates affected in the 35th, 36th and 37th districts.
It wasn't until a week into early voting that the county acknowledged and began to correct the problem.
When voters in the affected precincts - 175, 277, 403 and 416 - go to the polls, those who live in an area where their delegate district does not match up with the rest of their precinct will be given a ballot with the correct delegate district on it.
Staffers at the County Clerk's Office have been going through names of registered voters throughout the week and have highlighted those who might have been affected, so that poll workers can give them the correct ballot.
The affected voters are near Oakridge Drive in Precinct 175, Shannon Place in Precinct 277, Amity Street in Precinct 403 and Mary Street in Precinct 416.
At least 10 of those voters already have voted, and all the county can do is shrug.
"It's done," said Kent Carper, Kanawha County Commission president. "You couldn't identify who they were if you wanted to."
The precinct problems started when Charleston went from 21 wards to 20 wards for the 2015 election. To redraw boundaries, the city hired Jo Vaughan, a political mapping consultant.
It was Vaughan's responsibility to redraw the ward boundaries and ensure that each ward is nearly equal in population. The city did not take into consideration whether the delegate districts lined up with the ward districts.
Vaughan said she had noticed that the state did not take municipal boundaries into account when they redrew the state delegate districts in 2011. She said it would have been impossible to match the ward lines up with the delegate district lines, because the districts didn't follow the city boundaries.
"There is no way that the wards can respect those House lines," Vaughan said, "because they have to respect the city of Charleston in those wards."
When Charleston finished redistricting, it sent the maps to the county so it could set the precincts.
This is where it went wrong.
Kanawha County Clerk Vera McCormick said the city did not send maps that included the lines for the delegate districts (the city says otherwise). Because of that, the county assumed that the new ward lines matched up with the delegate lines and set the precincts based on the ward lines.
"I would have thought that they'd pay attention to the delegate district lines," McCormick said.
When voters are given a ballot on election day, it's based on the precinct in which they live. If a few voters live in a different delegate district than everyone else in the precinct, they'll end up with the wrong ballot at the poll for their delegate race.
The county has a responsibility to respect ward lines and district lines, but they couldn't do both.
This didn't matter in the city election in 2015. There were no state races at the time, so it didn't affect the ballot. But now that state races are taking place, people have noticed.
McCormick isn't taking responsibility for the mistake. She said it should have been caught by Vaughan, who does this for a living.
"I'm not taking responsibility, because they had a professional mapper to do that," McCormick said. "We're not professional mappers."
According to state law, it's the responsibility of the county to ensure that the precincts and districts match up. Delegate districts can be changed only by the Legislature.
"The county was supposed to take additional steps, by looking at it and determining if any changes need to be made," said Charleston City Attorney Paul Ellis.
No one has said the errors were made with malicious intent. And it isn't the first time Kanawha County has made a mistake.
In January, Calvin Grimm, a delegate candidate in the 35th District, noticed that he was registered in the wrong district after he moved. It took weeks of calling and intervention from the secretary of state to fix the problem.
"We just want to make every vote count in the correct district," Pushkin said.
The county has come up with a temporary solution to the problem for the primary, but the permanent solution might require some action from the state.
"The only solution is for the House [of Delegates] and the Senate to redraw district lines and respect the municipality of Charleston," Vaughan said.
Reach Daniel Desrochers at dan.desrochers@wvgazettemail.com, 304-348-4886 or follow @drdesrochers on Twitter.