{"id":9229,"date":"2012-04-04T13:08:34","date_gmt":"2012-04-04T20:08:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bradblog.com\/?p=9229"},"modified":"2012-04-04T13:07:24","modified_gmt":"2012-04-04T20:07:24","slug":"voted-ballots-remade-by-election-workers-in-wi-after-being-printed-too-wide-for-optical-scanners","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/?p=9229","title":{"rendered":"Voted Ballots ‘Remade’ by Election Workers in WI After Being Printed Too Wide for Optical-Scanners"},"content":{"rendered":"

During yesterday’s Wisconsin primary election, a number of paper ballots were sent out in several counties that were reportedly too wide to be tabulated by the computerized optical-scan systems used to tally ballots in the state. The same exact thing happened just two weeks ago during the Illinois primary<\/a> sending election officials into a panic and causing delays for some voters.<\/p>\n

Then, as now, the problem has been chalked up to a paper-cutting error by the printers. Perhaps that’s true, perhaps it’s not. We’ll take them at their word, barring evidence to the contrary. Innocent errors can<\/i> and do happen.<\/p>\n

But whether that’s an accurate explanation or not, one way in which the failure was dealt with in both Illinois and Wisconsin continues to be extremely<\/i> troubling and, frankly, offense: the practice of election workers manually “remaking” the ballots of voters after<\/i> the election, in ostensible secret, and before<\/i> they are tabulated…<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

From AP’s report<\/a> yesterday afternoon on what happened in Wisconsin [emphasis added<\/i>]…<\/p>\n

Election officials say printing companies cut the ballots too wide. Workers caught the problem before the election and had other companies produce right-sized ballots, but the change came too late for some absentee voters. Workers had to copy votes from the ill-sized ballots onto properly sized ones.<\/b><\/p>\n

Workers in six Portage County municipalities had to copy some absentee votes onto new ballots, too<\/b>, after a printing company put the wrong computer codes on ballots. Workers caught and fixed the problem before the election but not before some absentee ballots went out.<\/div>\n

It has become standard practice across the country for election workers to actually create new ballots, by hand, out of ballots that cannot be read by optical-scan tallying computers. The workers either “remake” those ballots correctly or incorrectly. Who knows?<\/p>\n

In some cases over the years, in places where touch-screen voting machines are used, but have broken down during the day — or in cases were voters preferred to use paper ballots, if allowed — votes cast on paper ballots are later actually punched into touch-screen e-voting systems by election workers. Again, the workers either carry out that sensitive, fraught-with-error operation either correctly or incorrectly. Who knows?<\/p>\n

All of that, instead of simply counting such ballots — or, all of them, frankly — publicly, by hand, as per “Democracy’s Gold Standard”<\/a>, as the bi-partisan election officials in Columbia County, NY now do<\/a>, or as they were forced to do over the weekend in Palm Beach, FL<\/a> after the optical-scan computers (the same ones used across almost all of Wisconsin, by the way), actually declared the wrong “winners” in several different races<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Was the ballot you cast when you last voted “remade” in secret by someone else after you cast it? If so, was it done accurately? <\/p>\n

As long as this appalling practice continues, you’ll likely never know.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/b><\/i><\/center><\/p>\n
The BRAD BLOG<\/a> covers your electoral system, fiercely and independently, like no other media outlet in the nation. Please support our work with a donation<\/a> to help us keep going.<\/span>Please CLICK HERE to help support our work today!<\/a><\/div>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

During yesterday’s Wisconsin primary election, a number of paper ballots were sent out in several counties that were reportedly too wide to be tabulated by the computerized optical-scan systems used to tally ballots in the state. The same exact thing happened just two weeks ago during the Illinois primary sending election officials into a panic […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[400,106,6,28,49,147,143],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-9229","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-election-2012","category-election-fraud","category-election-irregularities","category-election-reform","category-illinois","category-lava","category-wisconsin"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9229","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9229"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9229\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9229"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9229"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9229"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcoauthors&post=9229"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}