Baltimore City leaders grilled Board of Elections officials about why mistakes during the primary election happened during a committee hearing on Thursday. City council members were concerned about incorrect ballots based on old redistricting maps, missing flash drives with vote information and a primary election without enough judges or technicians to run the polls. Odette Ramos, who represents District 14, called the rules and legislative oversight hearing after complaints from voters during the primary election in July.

Ramos said it was an extremely important topic to discuss.

“Voting and making sure it is easy to vote is the most important thing we can do to preserve our democracy and when people are frustrated with voting, then it becomes an issue,” she said.

Complaints from residents rolled in about two weeks before the election and on primary election day. Some voters with accurate mail-in ballots were incorrectly told the ballots were wrong. A second round of mail-in ballots were factually incorrect.

“They ended up getting a third ballot which was correct,” she said.

Some voters received voter cards with incorrect information and they showed up to vote at the wrong polling location. Some said they were given incorrect ballots at the polls and used provisional ballots to vote instead.

“Several voters reported being turned around at the polling place due to errors in the poll books,” she said.

A shortage of election judges meant those without any experience were promoted to chief judges on the election day without enough technicians at the polls.

Baltimore City Board of Elections director Armsted Jones said that elections are never flawless. Changing the district maps happens once every 10 years in Maryland. The primary election was pushed back after a legal battle over redistricting.

“We normally have two to three months to do it,” Jones said about updating the maps. “We had two and a half weeks to do it. It’s a lot of involvement with maps, trying to make sure right streets are covered in that area of the redistricting.”

As a result, about 1% of voters were placed in the wrong district because of issues with the redistricting maps.

“No one should be in the wrong place,” Jones said.

About a dozen flash drives were not turned in after the polls closed on Election Day. Jones said that the flash drives were stored overnight at the polling places and then picked up in the morning. He said if there was a question about the information on those flash drives, his office re-ran the machines to ensure accuracy.

For the general election, officials plan to pay police overtime to collect and transport flash drives.

There was also a shortage of election’s judges and technicians which played a role in the missing flash drives.

Ahead of November’s general election, Jones said the city is still short about 1,000 judges.

“We are hard at work trying to recruit judges. We’re still training judges,” he said.

His office scheduled training for 60 judges on Wednesday, but only 10 showed up.

“We do the very best that we can with what we have in our hand to work with and we will continue to do that and work with what we have to make this process better,” he said.

Jones told the council his office is working on fixing these issues before the general election on Nov. 8.