The state Office of Elections has referred a case of potential attempted voter fraud in Hilo to the state Attorney General’s Office for investigation.

“At the Hilo counting center, the voting system did reject ballots as duplicates,” said Nedielyn Bueno, a spokesperson for the Office of Elections. Bueno declined to comment beyond that, directing further inquiry to the Attorney General’s Office.

Reached by phone, a spokeswoman for the Attorney General’s Office asked a reporter to send an email. “We’re not too sure which deputy is handling this,” she said. The email remained unanswered by the close of business.

The incident at the Hilo counting center was first reported by West Hawaii Today’s Nancy Cook Lauer on Tuesday. Lauer wrote that 11 ballots had matching bar codes, “indicating they had probably been photocopied,” and a machine rejected them on Election Day last week.

On Monday, Bueno told West Hawaii Today, “The vote counting system rejects duplicate ballots to prevent a ballot from mistakenly being scanned more than once by an operator or having multiple copies of the same ballot.” Bueno added, “There was an instance where duplicate ballots were flagged by the vote-counting system at the Hilo counting center, and the ballots were removed from the batch and secured.”

Tiffany Edwards Hunt, who observed the vote-counting process as a representative of the Big Island Press Club, said an employee of the voting machine vendor, Hart InterCivic, identified the problem.

“He announced that the computer had just rejected 11 ballots and that the ballots all appeared to have the same bar code and that they were on a different type of paper,” Edwards Hunt told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser in an interview. “Later on in the evening, that became the buzz,” she said. A spokesperson for Hart InterCivic did not respond to requests for comment.

“I was very comforted that the computer ejected the ballots, but I was also pretty concerned how they could have possibly got into that building because everything seems to be really tight,” Edwards Hunt said in the interview. “Watching those ladies and some of the men who volunteer to open up those envelopes and pull out the ballots, they’re pretty on it.”

How the duplicated ballots got as far as they did remains unclear. “If they didn’t come out of an envelope, then where did they come from?” Edwards Hunt said. “Did the ballots make their way into that stack that came in, or did someone who was in the room bring those ballots in?”

Calls to Hawaii County Clerk Jon Henricks and the Hawaii County Elections Division’s Cori Saiki were not returned by close of business.