Posted on 10/21/2004 6:55:49 AM PDT by Mike Fieschko
Denver election officials discovered Tuesday that about 13,000 ballots requested by absentee voters were never mailed.Denver Election Commission spokesman Alan McBeth attributed the mistake to a misunderstanding with a California vendor and promised that the missing ballots will be mailed by Thursday.
Officials decided to trace what happened to thousands of absentee ballots after their phone system was overwhelmed with calls from voters who had not received them.
Denver City Councilwoman Jeanne Faatz lamented the impact of the mistake on voters traveling abroad.
"I'm just really appalled," Faatz said.
The Denver commission's announcement that thousands of ballots had not been mailed was just one of the problems that have accompanied a deluge of requests for ballots from Colorado's absentee voters.
Jefferson County also found its phone system overwhelmed this week by calls from absentee voters wondering where their ballots were.
Its county clerk has a simple explanation for the temporary backlog in processing a deluge of absentee-ballot requests: The stamp machine broke.
In Arapahoe County, absentee voter Marlene Gutzait found a different problem with her ballot. The instructions told her it had to be placed in the secrecy sleeve. There wasn't one.
From county to county, harried election workers are struggling to meet a 72-hour deadline for responding to absentee-ballot requests from hundreds of thousands of people who plan to vote early.
Denver officials learned the source of their problem Tuesday. They had sent two lists of absentee voters to a California vendor hired to mail the ballots along with the required envelopes and a secrecy sleeve. One list contained about 13,000 names, the other about 30,000.
"For some reason they thought the second large list encompassed the first list," McBeth said.
The commission expects absentee voters to begin receiving missing ballots by Saturday, just 10 days before the election, and is urging those who have not received their ballots to wait.
Some Denver absentee voters reported other problems.
In Maryland, Denver voter Bob Valentine got a big surprise when he opened his absentee envelope.
There was no ballot inside. He also noticed instructions to return the ballot by August - two months ago - if he wanted his vote counted.
McBeth attributed the incorrect mailing deadline to "a misprint - someone left the August date in there" from the primary election.
"It's been corrected since we discovered it," he said, after the initial mailing of Denver's absentee ballots.
Valentine said Denver election officials promptly responded and said a ballot was en route.
County clerks say voters worried about missing absentee ballots can pick up replacements at their offices, and only one ballot per voter will get counted.
Jefferson County Clerk Faye Griffin has hired extra people to answer calls at an election-season phone bank and process requests from 110,875 voters for absentee ballots.
"People wonder why I'm a little behind. It's been crazy," she said.
She said that after the office stamp machine broke, her election crew worked through the weekend to sort ballots by ZIP code, as the postal service requested, and "they were on the post office's doorstep on Monday morning."
But by then, worried voters were overloading the phones.
Griffin urged absentee voters to get their answers from the automated system if they can.
Many voters have been frustrated by phone-system overloads.
Zachary Bissinger, a high school math teacher, said he called the Denver Election Commission three times and was put on hold once for 24 minutes in a fruitless effort to learn what happened to his ballot.
"I'm afraid that my vote is not going to count," he said. "Do they even know what they're doing?"
In Centennial, Gutzait worries that her ballot will be thrown out because of that missing privacy sleeve.
"I thought, 'Oh, gosh, maybe it doesn't count for anything because of this boondoggle,"' she said.
Arapahoe County Clerk Nancy Doty said it will.
"The ballot's still fine," she said. If a privacy sleeve is missing, the voter can wrap the ballot in the instruction sheet or a plain piece of paper, she said, and besides, "no one's looking at how anyone is voting."
Other county clerks in the Denver area said they have been able to keep up with requests for absentee ballots.
But those efforts have been complicated, Boulder chief deputy Nancy Wurl said, by party and independent committees asking voters to send absentee applications to them.
"People call to see why they haven't gotten their ballot - and we haven't received the application yet," she said. "We encourage them to check back or reapply directly to us."
< 'Rat>
C'mon dudes! I got 500 ballots to fill out between now and next Friday! I can't get them done if I don't get them all on time!
< /'Rat>
When I got my first election notice, it mentioned that you would have to re-apply for an absentee ballot. I did not do that because I was planning on early voting on-site this year.
When I got there they said I couldn't vote because I was coded as absentee. I have since received my ballot, but CO does appear to be completely screwed up this year.
ping
Since a lot of Republicans use absentee ballots, this is clear disenfranchisement. Republican's work so they can't take time off to vote, the election officials know this.
Lawsuit time.
Like to see some of those addresses. Wonder what percentage are military. Wonder about the uptick in absentee ballots.
What's wrong here is the whole election system is totally screwed up and knowing government it will never get fixed.
a quick way to fix this and other voter fraud is for the feds to show some of these libcampaign workers in chains being shuffled off to prison ... i'm thinking though, that if the polls keep going the way they are that fewer people will risk potential legal problems if they see that it won't do any good
Why did they farm this out to California and expect things to work? Is there no company in Denver qualified and equipped to send out these absentee ballots? Something stinky here.
The stamp machine broke!!????? THE STAMP MACHINE BROKE???!!
That's the lamest thing I've heard in a long time! Have they ever heard of GOING TO THE POST OFFICE AND PURCHASING STAMPS!!???
Sheesh!
Ah well, at least they caught it in time. My feeling is that more conservatives vote via absentee than libs.
<><
Pennsylvania is having problems with absentee ballot issues because of the legal fight from Democrats aimed at Ralph Nader
"Stamp Machine" is a misnomer. Actually, these machines sort the mail by zip, stamp it (in the sense of an ink imprint, not lick-and-stick), place a bar code on the bottom which is readable by the post office's sorting machines and bundle the results. Therefore, the sender gets a break on the postage, since much of the presorting has been done by the sender. The machine counts how many envelopes were stamped and that is verified by the post office.
The discounts scale with the level of the sorting. A few years ago, if you pre-sorted down to the zip+4 the rate was a mere 17.5 cents. So a failure of the machine meant that even sorting and stamping by hand (or lick-n-stick), the office took a huge financial hit to their mail budget.
The machine where I work sorts/stamps over 400,000 bills per month, and has to be taken down every 2 months for up to 3 days of routine maintenance. This causes a backup of up to 20,000 bills per day. Needless to say, developing a plan to deal with this has become high on managment's "to do" list.
You know, deliberate fraud efforts aside, it never ceases to amaze me that these people (meaning elected officials and govt offices in charge of this all over the US) can't get the ballots printed, handled, sorted and mailed properly and timely.
It's utterly ridiculous that in this day and age, we have so many voters that have to bug people to get a stupid ballot, correctly comprised, that they already asked for in the first place.
VERY well said. Great tagline material. :)
We don't have ours yet. We are a military family. Texas. NOt too worried about Bush there, yet we should be able to vote.
I have a relative that is military and is Arizona...he told me he'd never received his. Of course he's a republican.
These are the same people who are surprised that Christmas Day is always 12/25. SHTUPID..............
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