[EL] Palm Beach County

[John Tanner]

At least people won't be voting for Pat Buchanan by mistake

On Sun, Oct 21, 2012 at 5:29 PM, Steve Kolbert <steve.kolbert at gmail.com>wrote:

> 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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