BOSTON — Weeks before Boston’s most high-stakes mayoral primary in decades, the city’s state-run Elections Department has been caught in another blunder — mailing duplicate ballots to voters in a race that will decide whether Michelle Wu gets a second term.

First reported by the Boston Herald, the fiasco has now spiraled into full-blown Ballotgate. The Secretary of State’s office admits duplicate mail-in ballots were sent to some voters. Officials insist no one can vote twice. But sources who spoke to Mass Daily News say some of those ballots weren’t identical — they had names so similar, with tiny spelling differences, that they could slip past even a careful check.

One Boston voter told Mass Daily News the second ballot “looked like it could have been mine, just spelled wrong. If I didn’t notice, who’s to say it wouldn’t have been counted?”

A department already on probation

Boston’s Elections Department has been under state receivership since February, after an embarrassing breakdown during the 2024 presidential election. That debacle saw multiple precincts run out of ballots entirely, forcing Boston Police to ferry emergency replacements across the city in a last-minute scramble that made national news.

Secretary of State Bill Galvin, who ordered the takeover, called the city’s handling of that election “incompetence, plain and simple.” The state’s role was meant to stabilize operations, restore public trust, and ensure nothing like it ever happened again.

And yet here we are — months later — with a fresh blunder that has voters holding not one but two chances to cast their choice for mayor.

Wu silent, challengers circling

Mayor Michelle Wu, who is seeking a second term, has yet to publicly address the duplicate-ballot controversy. Her main challenger, Josh Kraft, isn’t mincing words.

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“The city elections department is already under state receivership on Election Day to ensure we don’t have a repeat of the last municipal election where polling stations ran out of ballots,” Kraft said in a statement. “Now, with Boston voters receiving more than one absentee ballot, I have serious concerns about the city’s ability to manage anything related to the election and may need even more oversight by the secretary of state.”

Kraft’s comments will likely resonate with voters who still remember the chaos of 2024 — and who may now be wondering whether this latest stumble is just incompetence, or something worse.

How duplicate ballots happen — and why it matters

Election officials say that when a mail-in ballot request is processed, it’s logged against a voter’s name in the database. If a duplicate ballot is somehow issued — whether because of a clerical error, a data mismatch, or a deliberate re-entry — only the first ballot returned should be counted. Any second one is supposed to be rejected automatically.

But the reports gathered by Mass Daily News raise a key concern: if two ballots arrive with names that are almost the same but spelled slightly differently, will the system still catch it? Or could it be processed as a separate voter entirely?

Not the only headline Boston elections are making

As if the timing weren’t bad enough, the U.S. Department of Justice has also quietly requested Massachusetts’ entire voter database, along with “information and data” on how the state maintains its voter rolls. The letter, sent July 22, is still under review by the Secretary of the Commonwealth’s legal team.

The DOJ says the move is about “clean voter rolls and basic election safeguards.” But in the middle of a high-stakes Boston race already marred by a ballot mishap, the optics aren’t helping.

A pattern of election-season chaos

For Boston residents, this isn’t just a one-off mistake — it’s part of a pattern.

November 2024: Multiple polling places run out of ballots during the presidential election, prompting emergency police deliveries.
February 2025: State takes over Boston’s Elections Department in response to the shortage fiasco.
August 2025: Duplicate ballots mailed to voters ahead of the September 9 mayoral and City Council preliminary elections.

Each incident chips away at the city’s credibility to conduct a clean, competent election. And each one makes it harder to convince skeptical voters that the process isn’t stacked against them.

The trust gap

Officials insist there are “several procedures and checks” to prevent double voting. But after years of ballot shortages, state takeovers, and now a mailbox flood of nearly identical ballots, the bigger problem isn’t the technical safeguards — it’s whether voters believe the people running the election.

For some, that trust is already gone. And unless Boston’s Elections Department can prove it has this under control, Ballotgate might be remembered as the moment it disappeared for good.

Boston Ballotgate: Duplicate Ballots Flood Mailboxes Weeks Before Mayoral Showdown