Susquehanna County, Pennsylvania, sent some overseas absentee ballots that have multiple errors: (1) Gary Johnson’s name is omitted; (2) Darrell Castle’s party name is listed as “Conservative” instead of “Constitution”; (3) the Green Party vice-presidential stand-in is listed, instead of the actual vice-presidential nominee. See this story at Election Law Blog. The county has apologized and says it has sent out corrected ballots to all the voters who received the faulty ballots.
UPDATE: Indiana County made the same error.
Wow . . . is that a record for top-of-ticket errors?
How many local moron regimes do NOT send copies of the proof ballots to the candidates or at least to a statewide election official for checking ???
Where is that Model Election LAW — for ALL regimes ???
If voters send back the original ballot, will those votes be counted?
If they have sent the original back already and then choose to send the corrected one back as well then their original will be voided and the corrected one will be the one that gets counted.
A couple of points: I spoke with the elections director of Susquehanna county, Diane Quattrocchi, and she stated it was her mistake and that there were only 10 of these which were sent out and that each person will receive a corrected ballot. She also said that technically these aren’t official ballots in that they only offer space to write-in the names of candidates and that it was the candidate’s list that was sent along with these that was inaccurate. The omission of Gary Johnson and Bill Weld was because they used a candidate’s list that was made between August 5th and August 19th which was the period where the stand-in candidates had withdrawn but Johnson and Weld had not yet been substituted so technically there were no Libertarian presidential candidates–however since August 30th is the deadline to prepare these early write-in ballots, the official list should have been used.
The official absentee ballot is a regular ballot and must be certified by the secretary of state. I was told that is in the process of happening this week and there should be no mistakes.
I’m hoping to find out if any other counties besides Susquehanna and Indiana made this error.
Richard – Thanks for contacting the Elections Director of Susquehanna County. Diane Quattrocchi’s answer makes the situation even murkier. Why would they send out “unofficial ballots” before the Aug 30th deadline? It seems like Hanlon’s Razor applies, “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”