Palm Beach County has seen yet another printing problem during this election.
According to The Palm Beach Post, "Elections Supervisor Susan Bucher said Monday that she has been forced to send new absentee ballots to about 500 county residents because of a new printing error."
The new mistake is different — and, some say, potentially more serious — than the one that prompted Bucher to hire dozens of workers, who have spent the past week hand-copying an estimated 27,000 absentee ballots. In that case, a header was missing from judicial races, making it impossible for vote tabulation equipment to read the ballots. Instead of being confused by a missing header, those who received the new flawed ballots are losing the chance to vote on one of 11 proposed amendments to the state constitution. Because one of the pages on the ballot was duplicated twice and one wasn’t printed at all, those same voters will be able to vote twice for three of the proposed amendments.
The Post reports that the flawed ballots gave voters the option of voting on Constitutional amendments 1, 2 and 3 twice-- but completely left out Amendment 5, which (like the last error) has to do with the Florida Supreme Court.
The corrected ballots were mailed out Wednesday and Thursday of last week.
Big election snafus like this are typically pretty rare and the last two big problems have both been in Palm Beach this election year.
