A. All ballots, including undeliverable ballots, shall be marked to indicate the date the ballot was received by the City Clerk.
B. Qualification and preprocessing of the ballots may begin twenty five (25) days before an election and continue until all returned ballots have been processed.
C. Once the ballot is returned, an election judge shall first qualify the submitted ballot by comparing the information on the return envelope with the voter registration records to determine whether the ballot was submitted by an eligible elector who has not previously voted in the election and whether the self- affirmation on the envelope is signed and completed by the eligible elector to whom the ballot was issued. If the ballot so qualifies and is otherwise valid, the election judge shall indicate in the poll book that the eligible elector cast a ballot and shall prepare the ballot for counting in accord with section 5.1.123 of this part.
D. If an election judge is unable to qualify the ballot as set forth above, the ballot shall be rejected and the reason for rejection shall be indicated in the poll book.
E. If the return envelope contains a replacement ballot, the ballot shall be set aside until seven o'clock (7:00) P.M. on the day of the election. The information on the return verification envelope shall be compared with the registration records. If the eligible elector to whom a replacement ballot has been issued has returned more than one return envelope, the first ballot returned by the elector shall be considered the elector's official ballot, the latter ballot shall be rejected and not counted. (Ord. 16-102)