[EL] Palm Beach County

[Steve Kolbert]

For those interested, I've attached a scanned image of an unmarked absentee
ballot from Palm Beach County that contains the printing error. (It comes
in two files because this scanner could not scan the entire 9.75" x 18"
ballot page all at once.)

As you can see, the ballot doesn't really look misprinted at all -- it's
very hard to tell there's an error even when you know to look for it, which
may be how Palm Beach County officials never noticed the misprint until it
was too late. (If you still can't find it, look in the second column for
the race for Tax Collector. Under that race, there are judicial retention
races -- but there is no heading that says "JUDICIAL RETENTION /MONTENER AL
JUEZ," as there are headings for every other race.)

This is an unfortunate error by a vendor, but it's important to note that
this error probably won't cause any voter confusion, even if Palm Beach
County's plan to tabulate the misprinted ballots will cause headaches for
the election administration staff. In other words, this is not another
butterfly ballot.

Steve Kolbert
(202) 422-2588
steve.kolbert at gmail.com
@Pronounce_the_T

On Oct 21, 2012 12:36 PM, "Rick Hasen" <rhasen at law.uci.edu> wrote:
>

> Holy Cow! They’ve Already Screwed Up the Ballots in Palm Beach County
> Posted on October 19, 2012 9:14 pm by Rick Hasen
>
> A major theme of The Voting Wars is that we learned the wrong lessons
after the Florida 2000 debacle.
>
> Here’s some good evidence at ground zero of the 2000 battles: Palm Beach
County:
>>
>> The problem started when an Arizona company that printed the ballots
failed to include a heading over the merit retention elections for judges
on the Florida Supreme Court and 4th District Court of Appeal. The mistake
was discovered and corrected after the first 60,000 ballots were printed
and 50,000 mailed.
>>
>> It was soon discovered that the error would affect all races on the
flawed ballot. When the header was inserted, the races on about half of the
ballots shifted, Bucher said. The shift will make it impossible for
tabulation machines to count the votes on an estimated 27,000 of the bad
ballots. Saying it would be impossible to program machines to read the
defective ballots, Bucher said the only alternative is to duplicate them by
hand.
>>
>> Late Friday, she sent Detzner a report, outlining how the process will
unfold Monday when workers begin opening, sorting and copying the roughly
15,000 absentee ballots that have been returned. Of the total, she said
about 8,600 are flawed.
>
>
>
> Posted in election administration, The Voting Wars | Comments Off
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