Memo to 268: Your vote didn't count, Absentee ballots were untallied

Posted on Wed, Aug. 27, 2003

Memo to 268: Your vote didn't count
Absentee ballots were untallied
BY ERIKA BOLSTAD AND NOAH BIERMAN
ebolstad@herald.com


Diane Whatley mailed her absentee ballot a week early for last year's primary election.

Eleven months later, her ballot sits -- still unopened and uncounted -- in a file with 267 others in the Broward State Attorney's office. The ballots, postmarked as much as a week before the primary, went unnoticed in a pile of thousands of pieces of elections mail dumped in the Broward elections office in the frenzied days leading up to the primary.

Until Tuesday, when they were contacted by Herald reporters, none of the 268 disenfranchised voters had any idea their votes didn't count.

''It's amazing,'' said Whatley, a 50-year-old former poll worker from Coral Springs. ``It counted for squat.'' (snip/...)

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/local/states/florida/counties/broward_county/6627385.htm

"Under state law, conduct involving carelessness -- as opposed to willful misconduct -- does not constitute a criminal act."

I'm a ballot clerk. We go through painstaking steps to ensure all ballots are handled properly. I do not accept the supposition that this was a careless act. And, on top of that, the supervisor hid the ballots when they were discovered. "Ultimately, she put them in a filing cabinet, covered with a few sheets of white paper and wrapped with rubber bands." Coverup on top of carelessness? In Florida, I suspect everything.

A freeper once claimed that Bush REALLY got more votes than Gore because once a candidate has enough votes to win (such as he is 1000 votes ahead and there are 999 left to count) then the counting stops. Apparently he think Bush got ALL of thes euncounted votes.\\

I worked an an election official here in Va (boy, was THAT a long) day, and i thinks the freeper is full of, um, food that the body has finished digesting and is ready to expel, but I'd like to hear it from a ballot cleck that the freeper is WRONG.

Of course that person is wrong. ALL votes are counted. At least that's the law. What happens in FL doesn't count...so to speak.

And we count them at least twice.

If I hear that "arguement" again I want to be able to say "A ballot cleck told me that that's most certainly not trie...."

I'm on a permanent list for it, but I also make certain to walk my ballot to the polling place and place it in the ballot box with the others, just to make certain it gets treated fairly.