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."
As recently as 1992, in Pennsylvania, you had to give a reason for your absentee ballot request when you sent it to the County Clerk's office, or the request could be denied.
Voting is not difficult, nor inconvenient -- especially not in a Presidential election year. I've put more effort into returning a rented video than I've put into voting, and I've voted on election day in every election (primary, general, and school board) for the past 12 years.
The only reason to vote absentee is if you are in the military or working out of town for an extended period of time. Otherwise, just go to the poll and get it over with.
Give all those employees overtime and get the damn ballots out!
OMG! I have been waiting weeks for my CO absentee ballot.
I called several times and was on hold for close to an hour. They said we should all have ballots by tomorrow...
we shall see. This is outrageous.
All the wrong "reforms" have been implemented.
The reform that is needed is a national database that insures people can only vote once, and only if they are alive and a citizen. Honestly, I have to show my driver's license to vote: why can't that be the basis of registration. For those who don't or can't drive, every state offers a state photo-ID card.
Instead, what we get are absentee ballots for no reason, early voting, screw the military, lawyers keeping third-party candidates off the ballot, threats of baseless "intimidation" lawsuits, promises that the loser will never concede, and so forth.
vote in 2000 - Bush #-% / Gore #-% / Nader #-%
Colorado 883,748 51 738,227 42 91,434 5
The total population of Colorado is 4.3 million. 1.7 million actual votes were cast in 2000. Absentee ballots and new registrations this year are both around 6% of all votes cast last time. Bush's margin of victory in 2000 was 9% of the vote, 145,000 votes, and each of the above is current north of 100,000.
According to a report by the AP yesterday the state has less than 4.3 million eligible voters, but 4.2 million are registered, an astounding 98 percent.
AP reports that, "The result is that in 36 of Missouri's 114 counties and in the city of St. Louis, more voters are registered for the November elections than were residents age 18 and older in the July 2003 Census Bureau estimate." St. Louis has 246,320 voting-age residents and 281,316 of them are registered to vote.
One county in Missouri recently sent out absentee ballots that omitted George Bush and Dick Cheney as candidates.
From NRO's battleground state watch...
Another vote to create a national ID with picture requirement for voting!!!
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