Glitches mar Oregon mail-in election

The Associated Press PORTLAND, Ore. (October 24, 2000 8:38 p.m. EDT http://www.nandotimes.com) - Some voters didn't get a whole ballot, some got one too many, but county and state election officials say problems have been minor leading up to the first-in-the-nation general election to be conducted solely through the mail.

Secretary of State Bill Bradbury said officials hope to get a voter turnout in excess of 80 percent by making it easier to vote. However, since the ballots went out Friday, election officials have been slowly learning about glitches in the system.

Portland residents Dawn and Richard Afman opened their mailed ballots Saturday to find duplicate pages on statewide ballot measures, but no pages for candidates and local measures.

"My big concern is, people need to know they should check now, or it's going to be too late," Richard Afman said.

Ballots are due at elections offices no later than 8 p.m. on Election Day, Nov. 7. Voters who find ballot problems after Nov. 2 will have to personally pick up new ballots to ensure they'll be in the mail in time.

Vicki Ervin, Multnomah County elections director, said replacement ballots already have been sent to a couple dozen voters in her county who had called saying crucial pages were missing from their ballots.

The mistakes apparently occurred when some envelopes were filled by hand after the machine that normally does the work jammed, Ervin said.

In Baker County, problems in a computer program that labels the election ballots meant 200 county voters got two ballots instead of one. Election staff had to restart the label program several times, which probably resulted in duplicate labels, said County Clerk Julia Woods.

"It makes me sick, but there's nothing we could do about it," Woods said. "When we ran out of ballots, I should have known something was wrong."

She said voters who received two ballots should throw one away. The computer that processes the ballots will reject any attempts to vote twice, she said.

http://www.nandotimes.com/no_frames/politics/story/0,4457,500272333-500424788-502653452-0,00.html

-- Doris (reaper@pacifier.com), October 25, 2000

Answers

The computer that processes the ballots
will reject any attempts to vote twice,
she said.

Is that the same computer that made double
labels

-- spider (spider0@usa.net), October 26, 2000.