Blow-Dried Ballots - no kidding !

[harmonyguy]

The New Hanging Chad 11/12/04
Hanging chads are old news. The latest impediment to voting is...humidity?

Oswego County election officials couldn't tally 800 to 900 absentee ballots because their scanner kept jamming. Fortunately, Dee Brown, sales manager at Parsons, Kan.-based manufacturer The Flesh Co., did her part on Nov. 4 to ensure all votes were counted. Brown, whose daughter worked at the polls, stopped by to visit when she spotted the problem. "Those pages had picked up moisture and made them extremely curly and uneven," she says.

The ballots had been sitting around for weeks. Brown ran a batch of fresh forms through the machine to prove it worked, then instructed officials to get a hair drier. A worker brought his drier from home, and Brown and her daughter started drying the ballots at the County Clerk's office. There's no right way to blow-dry a ballot, Brown notes with a smile, but for the record, her daughter held the drier while Brown fanned small stacks of ballots in front of it. "You could physically see the difference after we did it," Brown says.

Brown's actions earned her more than pride at fulfilling her civic duty. A Parsons Sun reporter learned about the incident and turned it into a front-page story. Before long, the Associated Press picked up the story and distributed it nationwide. "I meant to be there for five minutes, and it probably ended up being two hours," Brown says. Now she's receiving letters from readers across the country.

http://www.printsolutionsmag.com/news.html#chad

[RedEagle]

1. Why aren't election officials on their way out the door for this sort...

...of thing? Why were those ballots sitting around?

In our county, the absentee ballots have signatures confirmed, are sorted, then locked in a vault until it's time to count them.

Over and over the stories about ballots just sitting around....


It's time for some new officials in office. A ballot is the fundamental right in a democracy and they should not be treated like so much paper lying around.