For the second time in less than a week, Hamilton County election officials are reprinting ballots because of a mistake.

Hamilton County Election Commission officials were having all 140,000 of the county’s Aug. 7 election ballots reprinted this week after the U.S. Senate race was omitted from both Democratic and GOP ballots.

On Wednesday, officials said they will have to print for the third time about 50,000 Republican ballots because the name of a primary challenger to U.S. Rep. Zach Wamp accidentally was left off during the first reprinting.

Workers were reprinting 72,000 GOP ballots when they realized that 50,000 of them were reprinted containing the error.

The GOP ballots were printed without the name of Teresa Sheppard of Luttrell, Tenn., a town northeast of Knoxville.

“I’m very disturbed about it,” county election administrator Bud Knowles said Wednesday afternoon. “I’m here to say that it won’t happen again.”

Mr. Knowles said a commission staffer noticed Wednesday morning that Ms. Sheppard was not on the ballot for the 3rd Congressional District GOP primary. He said the omission was detected before all the ballots were printed.

The commission will implement a new system of checks and balances to try to prevent future mistakes, Mr. Knowles said.

Charlotte Mullis, chief deputy election administrator for Hamilton County, said all the Democratic ballots were reprinted properly. She said the GOP ballots are being reprinted again and will be ready by next Tuesday.

“It’s not going to result in any delay whatsoever,” she said.

Ms. Mullis said the county commission will pay for the GOP ballot reprint, but she does not yet know how much it will cost.

Mr. Knowles said the paper ballots cost about 17 or 18 cents apiece. At that rate, 50,000 ballots would cost between $8,500 and $9,000 and 140,000 ballots would cost between $23,800 and $25,200.

State Election Coordinator Brook Thompson said his office checks the formula sample ballot to look for uniformity and to ensure that races appear in the correct order. But he said the state does not proofread all the different ballots in each county. Hamilton County, for instance, has multiple state House and state Senate districts included within the county lines.

“It’s regrettable that it happened,” Mr. Thompson said of the omission. “We did not see that it was left off.”

Rep. Wamp and Ms. Sheppard are the two candidates in the 3rd Congressional District GOP primary. Democrat Doug Vandagriff is running unopposed in the Democratic primary.

Independent candidates Ed Choate and Jean Howard-Hill will appear on ballots for the Nov. 4 general election.

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