Teams of election workers have been toiling around the clock to clean up over 100,000 ballots that were mailed in for the election. According to the County Registrar’s office, a printer toner smudge that appeared on the ballots was confusing the vote counting machines. “We realized that the machine that counts the ballots was outstacking, was setting aside a larger number than usual ballots that had extraneous marks, or were marked as write-ins but they didn’t actually have a write-in ballot,” explained County Registrar Matt Moreles.
The solution was simple, but also time consuming. Dozens of election workers armed with erasers went through each mail-in ballot individually and erased the smudges that appeared. It was a time-consuming operation. Over 100,000 ballots had to be manually inspected and “erased” before they could be processed. It was either that or rejecting the will of 100,000 voters.
ProVoteSolutions, the company that produced the ballots, has announced that it will compensate Santa Clara County for all of the costs involved in manually inspecting and cleaning up the ballots. Fortunately for them, the county was the only place serviced by the company that reported a problem with smudges.
Read More at ABC 7.
