The discrepancies were found during the certification of petitions collected by Hamilton fire unions seeking to consolidate the township's 9 fire districts.
HAMILTON -- Officials certifying the petitions seeking to consolidate Hamilton's nine fire districts found nearly 10,000 Hamilton voters are assigned to the wrong fire district in Mercer County's voter database.
Hamilton officials discovered the errors and lay it at the feet of Mercer County Board of Elections, who they say is the responsible party in keep the records up to date.
The Hamilton Council says dealing with the issue recently has been a waste of time and a frustrating delay in the consolidation process, which started last fall.
"By the county not having the information in the system, which they should have had, it slowed our progress of certifying the petitions greatly because we had to create manual records," Hamilton Council President Illeana Schirmer said in an email.
In March, the township's two firefighters' unions delivered the petitions - 2,500 of them, covering all nine districts - to the Hamilton Clerk with great fanfare, personally handing them in with Mayor Kelly Yaede.
The handing over of the petitions followed months of public discussions within the township's fire community, which had discussed such a consolidation for years, but never moved forward.
Since then, it's been a behind-the-scenes quagmire, officials said.
The Mercer County Board of Elections did not immediately return a message seeking comment about the issue.
Schirmer explained what's been happening.
The Hamilton clerk's office found during their certification process that many of the signatures and addresses turned in by firefighters were not listed in the Board of Elections' database, and some were assigned to the wrong fire districts, Schirmer said. The clerk's office notified the board of the issue.
The township had the Hamilton engineering division provide the board with a spreadsheet listing by street all the property addresses within each district.
Hamilton Clerk Eileen Gore and Assistant Township Attorney Bruce Darvas then met with board officials about the issue and were told Hamilton should hire another company to create an "overlay" to make sure the fire districts were properly assigned, Schirmer said.
At that meeting, the county advised Hamilton such a move would incur some cost as a result.
The township balked at that, since it's the county's responsibility to maintain the voting records, Schirmer said.
Gore, the clerk, then consulted Hamilton's technology department and Everyone Counts, the company that maintains the New Jersey's State Voter Registration System, or SVRS, to see if Hamilton's spreadsheet could be added to the SVRS.
Everyone Counts said they could not do the work themselves but they had advised the Mercer board on how to do it, Schirmer said.
The board told Hamilton officials that no immediately corrections to the SVRS system would be done to correct the fire district issues as it was a presidential election year, Schirmer said.
Meanwhile, at the conclusion of Hamilton's in-house, manual process on the petitions, the clerk's office found over 9,600 Hamilton voters were not assigned to the correct fire district - 16% of the total number of registered voters in Hamilton.
Hamilton has sent a letter to the board advising them of their findings and asking for a response by the end of this week.
The township clerk's office continues to verify the petitions and will continue using their manual process when a street or voter does not appear in the database, Schirmer said.
And Schirmer said the fire unions have since been collecting additional signatures.
"The SVRS system/voting record of each registered voter is one of the main responsibilities of the county level of government," Schirmer said. "While it was brought to their attention, they did not provide the level of required support needed to make the necessary corrections to the system."
The township's two firefighters unions declined to comment on the issue Monday.
Five percent of a fire district's voters need to sign petitions for the township council to start the consolidation process and Hamilton fire unions have they needed 2,200 of them in the nine districts, but collected 2,500 to be on the safe side.
Kevin Shea may be reached at kshea@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter@kevintshea. Find NJ.com on Facebook.