Hand-copying bad Palm Beach County absentee ballots likely to lead to errors, lawsuits, election obs
Despite Palm Beach County Elections Supervisor Susan Bucher’s assurances that safeguards will be in place to make sure as many as 27,000 absentee ballots are copied accurately, there is no way that many ballots can be duplicated without mistakes, a local GOP leader and a former Florida secretary of state said Thursday.
“With people copying around 30,000 ballots and each marking votes in 20 races, that’s 600,000 marks,” Palm Beach County Republican Chairman Sid Dinerstein said. “Some of them will be incorrect.”
“Every time you duplicate a ballot you run the risk of making a mistake, particularly with 27,000 ballots,” agreed Kurt Browning, who was responsible for the state’s Division of Elections during the five years he served as secretary of state under Govs. Charlie Crist and Rick Scott.
The number of ballots that will be duplicated is unprecedented, said Browning, who also served 26 years as supervisor of elections in Pasco County. Even with dozens of people working, it will take hours and hours to sort them and copy them by hand.
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/news/local-govt-politics/hand-copying-bad-palm-beach-county-absentee-ballot/nShBR/
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Allen West was sent to the House of Representatives from a district that was carved out of Palm Beach and Broward Counties so I don't think you can say it is controlled by Democrats. 
The current Supervisor of elections is a Democrat, but she can't vouch for every employee nor can she vouch for every printer in the county. The ballot is six pages long and the header was a perfect target if this wasn't an accident, or a perfectly understandable mistake if it was. At least it was caught well before election day...something the republicans would never have revealed.
I worked the polls in the Democratic primary in August....That was the first election after the new redistricting forced reassignments of polling precincts. Turnout was very light, but fully 1/3 of those who did turn out, came to the wrong polling place. When I complained about this at the SOE's office I was given a long list of things they did in an attempt to notify people of the new precinct assignments. The easiest thing to do would have been to mail out new registration cards to all registered voters, but the expense involved makes that prohibitive as they just don't have the budget for it. Because of the light turnout, I had the opportunity to talk with several of my co-workers and was amazed at how many of them, after working the polls for years, actually believe there is "voter fraud" running rampant across the state....so you know they are republicans.
There is much anxiety among those who run the election process here....I think so much so that mistakes become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The 2000 election fiasco was brought up in the class I had to attend on Oct. 11th. There will be a lot of trouble on Nov.6th. They are short Precinct Clerks for this election, which is the job with the most responsibility at the precinct level....This will only be my second election working at the polls so I don't feel I have enough experience to take on that job. One 6 hour class isn't enough training IMHO. There will be many more people showing up at the wrong precinct, the reduced early voting hours will make the lines extremely long and most of us don't expect to get out of the precinct until 10:00 pm at the earliest...after signing in at 6:00 am....sigh....
