George Rebane
At a bon voyage dinner party last night for some couples leaving for a month-long South American cruise, we heard a most incredible story. One friend, who lives in Morgan Ranch, reported receiving six (like in 6) absentee ballots, each with a different control number, during the course of the last three or four weeks. After the second one arrived, she called the county elections office to report the anomaly. All of her identifying ballot data was confirmed, and she was instructed to destroy the second ballot which she promptly did.
After a few days she was surprised to receive a third ballot. Again she called the county to report it. Again they dutifully took down all the data and, as before, instructed her to destroy the most recently received ballot. This sequence continued every few days until last Saturday when she received her sixth absentee ballot. When she called in she talked to a lady who identified herself as ‘Beth’. Beth repeated the, by now familiar, process of querying for all the relevant data, and again instructed our friend to destroy the last supernumerary ballot. And then Beth ended the conversation by assuring our friend, “Oh you won’t get any more ballots, the most we send out is six.” Our friend was incredulous at this remark and so were the rest of us around the dinner table.
So our friend had received six separate voting packages, and dutifully destroyed five of them as instructed. It seemed appropriate to conclude from the sanguine manner in which this episode was handled by the county elections office, that this was not an isolated incident. It leads one to wonder how many more people out there had more than one ballot mailed to them, and what they all did with these ballots.
I am waiting for some news to come out of the Registrar’s office about how this irregularity is being handled so that we can be assured of a proper vote count. And folks on this election day seem to want government to handle more of our affairs?
[update – just got an email from Pascale at YubaNet who wrote “By the way, I saw your blog post about the 6 ballots. I asked the elections office for an explanation and actually, it appears from documents that your friend registered twice. Once in 89 and once in 2008. Unfortunately, she gave different years of birth. That’s why she was in the system twice.” I’ll try to resolve this with my friend who’s now on a ship in the Pacific. The mystery with DaveC remains, did he also register twice? I hope it’s all as simple as that.]
rebanesruminations.com 
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