Virginia Senate candidate Democrat's last name not on ballot

Webb is a long name?!?!

It CAN be remedied by election day if they really want to. For starters, why is his nick name important for a ballot? I'm positive that the candidate name is user entered and can be user modified.

Holy sh!t.

Well, better not say too much abouot this - the rightwingers will say we're contriving excuses for a loss.

To be fair, I do think it's just a mistake. But really, it's not that hard to fix, and shouldn't have been that hard to anticipate.

We have our own little Ballot-Gate going on in California:


Defective absentee ballot tally rises
By Ed Fletcher - Bee Staff Writer
Last Updated 12:56 am PDT Wednesday, October 18, 2006
Story appeared in METRO section, Page B1




Printer Eagle Press said it was not responsible for flawed ballot distribution.

Sacramento Bee/Randy Pench


The number of Sacramento County residents who reported receiving incomplete or flawed absentee ballots continued to climb Tuesday, leading to internal hand-wringing and external finger-pointing.

By midafternoon Tuesday, the number of absentee voters reporting problems with their ballots reached 85 -- representing 17 voting zones.

"This is just baffling to say the least," said Jill LaVine, the county registrar. "I can't find a common thread."

Officials said the intense media coverage and subsequent phone calls from voters would help give them a better understanding of the breadth of the problems.

But officials said Tuesday they are confident that mailing issues do not affect every voter within the problem zones.

Absentee voters should receive two different double-sided paper ballots -- one listing candidates for local and state races, and the other state and local ballot measures.

But voters from a wide range of voting zones -- from Natomas to Elk Grove -- are reporting errors in their mailings. In some cases, voters received only one ballot card; in others, voters got two of the same card.

In additions, voters are being asked to check their absentee ballots to ensure they match their sample ballots, which were mailed earlier.

If they don't match, they could miss voting in school board, water board, park and recreation and fire district races, for example.The number of incorrect mailings were higher in some zones, but officials said they don't yet see a pattern.

The priority is getting the correct ballots to voters, officials said. But LaVine said Tuesday her office has asked for a legal opinion from the secretary of state's office about how to proceed if voters returned two ballot cards with duplicate choices.

Also, with ballots already coming in, LaVine is asking for an opinion on whether her office can open mailed-in ballots early to catch flawed ballots and help ensure those voters have a chance to vote on the entire ballot. The law says ballots can't be opened until a specified period before the election.
Elections officials from surrounding counties said they have not experienced similar problems, several noting that their smaller size allows them to keep more operations in-house.

"We don't trust the printer to do anything other than print the ballot," said Freddie Oakley, Yolo County's registrar.

Oakley's one-page ballots do not have to be printed in English and Spanish.

And Yolo County has 90,000 voters, compared to Sacramento County's 617,000 registered voters.

Sacramento County hired two vendors for the absentee ballot process: the printer, Eagle Press, and distributor, Admail West.

On Tuesday, each blamed the other for most of the problems.

Based on e-mails obtained by The Bee and interviews with those involved, the problems began not with the actual printing of the paper ballots, but with the post-production labeling, boxing, sorting and mailing -- in which both vendors had roles.

Beginning Oct. 3, e-mails exchanged between the county and Eagle Press, the printer, discuss problems with the shipments of absentee ballots the county received.

The problems included "test ballots" not properly labeled, shipments that were not on the attached packing list, ballots that weren't folded as ordered, boxes that were improperly labeled and a "bundle" of "B" cards mixed with an "A" card box.

Because of those problems, the county asked Admail West, the company it uses to sort and mail the ballots, to take extra quality control measures.

Kasey Cotulla, president of Eagle Press, said printing 1.4 million pieces of mail with 178 ballot types is difficult.

"There will be challenges processing this much data," Cotulla said.

But the printing company official said his firm shouldn't be blamed if voters got only one of the two ballots because that was the responsibility of the distributor to sort the printed materials.

Admail West officials said the operation would be smoother if they handled more of the post-production work in labeling and boxing the printed material.

In an e-mail to the county, a company official acknowledged that some of the problems could be their responsibility.

Kathy Pescetti, one of the company's owners, said the firm did its best to be error-free.

"We worked head-over-heels to get this right," said Pescetti.

An election advocate wants the county to get things right.

"I hope they caught it early enough," said Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Foundation. "Fortunately, the people who vote absentee are on their toes."

Both those inside and outside the election business agreed conducting elections in California is not easy.

"The election is a machine with millions of moving parts. Over 600,000 of those parts are people. There are going to be glitches. In our business, there are going to be glitches," said Yolo County's Oakley.

They learned about the problem a week ago, there are still 2 weeks until the election and they can't fix it? Bulls*it. It's one lousey district. Change the friggin' font size.