BBV - Hundreds of Absentee Ballots may be 'Lost' - Solano County

RIO VISTA -- Hundreds of absentee ballots destined for Rio Vista voters may have been lost in the mail, a Solano County Registrar of Voters official said Thursday.

"We sent a batch of permanent absentee ballots to folks in Rio Vista, put them in the mail on Oct. 6, and we've been getting calls that they haven't been coming in," Elections Manager Deborah Seiler said. "Effectively, they've been lost."

City Clerk Margaret Roberts, whose office began receiving complaints this week, said local postal workers told her about 300 ballots were "misplaced" in Oakland.

http://www.dailyrepublic.com/articles/2004/10/22/news/news7.txt

but I've noticed you start a whole lot of your threads with "BBV". Not every election problem is a result of "black box voting".

...a couple of times. You're absolutely right - not all election problem is a result of BBV, although frequently the election problems are a result of the improper management of the election process, by many of the same people responsible for the BBV mess.

I use the BBV heading to draw the attention of those who are active in the whole issue of voting irregularities , which of course includes BBV.

Maybe I should use BBV* or BBV(sort-of)

Cheers
HG

It makes the threads easier to find amidst all of the other conversation.

For those of us that are contributing to the November democratic effort through clean election activism, DU is an invaluable resource to communicate information rapidly.

However, it's really hard to find the threads that have to do with election procedural problems, so that we can potentially dispatch people locally to look into these issues, unless they have a tag of some sort to differentiate them from all of the other stuff. Some times time is of the essence in dealing with these things.

"BBV" as a tag to identify 'em is as good as any.

Could it be that the repubs will end up hurting themselves in California?

I think you should keep putting it in the title for the people looking for irregularities. It makes it easier for them, some are making lists.

Although there's a lot of Dems and progressives involved in clean election advocacy, there are Greens and Libertarians and even Republicans also advocating for clean, honest, accurate systems. There are a lot of systemic problems existing that affect both sides of the aisle.

I know this may be blasphemy on DU, but I'd rather lose honestly to an "R", than win with a flawed system and an inaccurate result.

(Besides, I think when the playing field is fair, we win the majority of the time.)

I stand corrected

I do not work in an office that handles BBM delivery (bulk business mailings- hehe gotcha!), but I can say that this is quite possibly a legit mistake.

Let me explain something to those of you who do not work in and have never toured a large postal facility. Everything does get done, but to an outsider, it's often done in an incomprehensible fashion.

For example:

A letter that comes into our building from you comes in at our loading dock, gets put into a hamper with several hundred other letters, large "flat" envelopes, small (hand sized) parcels, and such. These items are dumped into a machine that first separates them out first by thickness, then by dimensions. What's left after this process are ordinary letters, which are sorted in an Automated Facer/Canceler/Sorter (AFCS). This electronically reads the script writing on the face of the envelope, as well as detecting the presence of a stamp, and the direction the letter is faced.

All letters that can be read are sprayed with a barcode right there, which contains the address information only. If a barcode already exists- such as with business reply mail, bill payments, and so forth- the letter is sorted at high speed into a letter tray and sent to a Delivery BarCode Sorter (DBCS). More on that in a moment.

If the script on the letter cannot be read, the letter is sent to the Input SubSystem machine (ISS). This takes a photo image of the letter face and is presorted by city. The image of the envelope is sent to a Remote Encoding Center (REC site- I worked at one of those as well), where the address data is manually keyed by a Data Conversion Operator (DCO). That data is sent back to the originating plant, where it is sprayed as a barcode onto the envelope on yet another machine called an Output SubSystem (OSS).

Eventually, each letter with a barcode will find its way to a DBCS, mentioned above. There, the letter is sorted at a speed of (ideally) around 40,000 pieces per hour. That is not a typo. From there, the letter may be subject to further sortation on a DBCS with a different sortplan (there are 172 stackers on most of the DBCS machines in our plant, and multiple sortplans for different purposes), sometimes several times, before making its way to a carrier.

When bulk mailing do come into our plant- usually business adverts, bulk bill mailings (AmeriTech, Verizon, Consumer's Energy, etc), and so on- They are on large pallets (aka 'skids') hefted in by forklift and unceremoniously plopped down in front of us. If these are mistagged, or the driver makes an error, they can end up in a totally incorrect portion of the plant. This is where a vulnerability may lie WRT absentee ballots being mailed to a known Democratic or Republican stronghold. If the forklift operator is politically aware and highly unethical, and is willing to break the law and put his job and his freedom on the line, he very well could park that skid in an inappropriate location in the plant.

This still would not prevent those absentee ballots from being delivered. These things are not small and are quite heavy when they are full; they do not go unnoticed in a well-run facility. In fact, if the ballot delivery were delayed somehow at the delivery point, it could as easily be blamed upon poor postal management, poorly trained 'casual' level employees (and we are using them quite a bit at our facility; those of us who have been there a while do our best to train them on the fly), worker apathy, or something else related to the plant; it isn't necessarily intentional voter fraud.

But then, that in no way makes that an impossible explanation; my purpose here is to detail what happens in a postal plant. There are a multitude of places where a simple, honest error can be made; there are just as many places for someone with malicious intent to foul things up. That is the nature of this massive beast we call the Postal Service; it would be the same were the entire operations of the plant fully automated with no actual worker involvement.

Many of the trucks that come into our plant carry the slogan "B&B" on the trailer. That may be another place to investigate regarding this absentee ballot issue; I do not know for certain whether they are used regionally or nationally.

Hope I've been of some help.

kfgnally,

Maybe we can use your help in securing absentell balloting to the best degree possible.

In some states, it's very popular and just isn't going to go away.

Thanks for an inside look at the process.