One of the largest fears of absentee ballot voting is the potential for voter fraud.

The Chautauqua County Board of Elections and school district officials throughout the county are working their best to try and prevent voter fraud from occurring during the school budget vote and board elections, which have been taking place by absentee ballots.

Brian Abram, Chautauqua County Board of Elections Republican election commissioner, said county and school officials try their best to prevent mistakes, such as sending a ballot to someone now deceased. However, he said it’s not a crime until someone participates in the voting process fraudulently.

“With the ballots going out, it’s important to be as accurate as we can be, but that doesn’t give a person the right to cast a ballot that doesn’t belong to them,” he said. “We want to be perfect, but we can’t be. We still rely on people only voting on a ballot they are allowed to cast.”

Juanita Walker, Jamestown Public Schools district clerk and secretary to the superintendent, said the school district is provided with the poll books from the county Board of Elections that are used to check each absentee ballot signature.

“When an absentee ballot comes back to us, the envelopes that are returned have a separate attestation envelope inside of them. On that attestation envelope, on one side, is a place to write the person’s name and address. It also includes mailing instructions. On the other side is the statement of absentee voter,” she said.

“The attestation envelope must be signed in order for the ballot to be valid. The voter places their ballot in the attestation envelope, then returns the attestation envelope and the ballot to the school in a business reply envelope, which we provided.”

Walker said once the envelope reaches the school district, they remove the attestation envelope and verify the signature in the poll book provided by the county Board of Elections.

“The (county) Board of Elections will open the attestation envelope, ballots will be removed unfolded and placed candidate side down,” she said. “Ballots will then be shuffled to increase the anonymity. Ballots are then taken to the high-speed scanner, which tallies the votes.”

Walker said last year the school district sent 387 absentee ballots and received around 100. She said in addition to herself, the district will have one other person verifying the signatures on the ballots received by the district before they are transported to the county Board of Elections to be opened and counted. She said, as of Tuesday afternoon, the district had received 3,500 ballots.

On Sunday, Gov. Andrew Cuomo pushed back the original date of the school budget vote and board elections from June 9 to June 16. All absentee ballots received by mail before 5 p.m. Tuesday will be counted.