Santa Clara election workers use erasers to clean mail ballots

SANTA CLARA, Calif. (BCN) - An ink smudge on Santa Clara County ballots caused a mechanical glitch at the county elections office last week, forcing officials to reprocess mail-in ballots and re-inspect ballots being sent to polling precincts for Tuesday's election.

About one in six of the first 100,000 vote-by-mail ballots processed were incorrectly flagged by an "optical character reader" as ballots containing write-in candidates, county officials said.

The error was the result of the smudge, which was caused by toner used by the company that printed the ballots, elections officials said.

"We noticed that a higher number of ballots than usual were being set aside by the OCR," said Jesse Durazo, Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters. "Upon reviewing those ballots, they did not contain write-in candidates, so we knew there must be another reason."

Workers erased the marks then reprocessed them.

Ballots stored at the registrar's warehouse were re-inspected, and the toner smudges were erased by hand before the ballots were delivered to polling places.




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Get rid of all electronic tabulators.

considering we're a county of 1.8 million people.

They put the front and back of a little arrow pointing to each candidate, or position on a ballot question, and you're supposed to connect the two by drawing a line between them.

Then when you're done, you just put the ballot in a plain old cardboard box. No scanner or anything -- and no way to know whether or not the contents of said box went straight into the shredder.

It's a long ballot that takes a bit of time to complete, what with all the propositions and a bevy of Judges waiting to be rubber stamped. I had smudges all over my ballot when I was done, but I cleaned it up myself before sending it back.