I once worked for a company where every month or so, I would get blank sheets printed out that had a checklist printed on them that I could use to mark my progress on particular projects.
This was a copy of about fifteen or twenty sheets that I only used for one very specific, throwaway purpose.
Once, they came back from the printer with a mistake on them where I would have to make manual corrections to about half of the stuff I had to check off, adding about 15 extra minutes to each day. It wasn’t that big of a deal, just a bit of a pain in the butt.
I cannot imagine making a mistake on the most important election of our time.
More than 2,000 “faulty” mail-in ballots sent out in Los Angeles County did not give voters an option to vote for president, according to the LA County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk’s Office.
The Los Angeles Times reported that 2,100 of the faulty ballots, which were missing a box for voters to decide on a presidential candidate, ended up in mailboxes mostly in the Woodland Hills area of the San Fernando Valley.
The decision to send the ballots in the first place came after California Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an order in May requiring all registered voters in the state to receive unsolicited mail-in ballots.
The Times reported of this week’s ballot irregularities, “The botched effort was part of a campaign to mail 21 million ballots to registered California voters. About 5.6 million of those voters are in L.A. County. State law mandates that absentee ballots be mailed 29 days ahead of the Nov. 3 election.”
The election is 28 days away from Tuesday, the date the Times report was filed.
How state law will be navigated to remedy the situation is unclear.
Michael Sanchez, a spokesman for the County Clerk’s Office, said those who received the botched ballots will still be able to vote.
“If they have already filled out and mailed their original ballot … we will cancel their original ballot once their new ballot is received,” he told the Times.
Sanchez also assured voters the problem was limited to the Woodland Hills area, saying, “While this has impacted a very small number of Los Angeles County voters … we nevertheless apologize to those affected by the mistake.”