May 20, 2003
(Updated) On Pens & Pencils, Ballots & Envelopes, and the 'Portland Tribune'
Note: This post has been updated. Any and all updates appear at the end of the original post.
There will be much to post over the course of the day, most likely, but I wanted to get this one out of the way. It's from Phil Stanford's column on today's Portland Tribune:
And to top it off, the Multnomah County Elections Division doesn't even have its act together. Am I the first one to notice the contradictory voting instructions on the mail-in ballot? On the ballot it says: "You may use pen (black or blue) or pencil." On the "secrecy envelope": "We suggest you USE A #2 PENCIL to vote. (If you use a pen, mark over any votes with a #2 pencil.)" Huh?
No, Phil, you're not the first one to notice. However, some of us also thought about it for a moment and realized that while they had to print new ballots for this election, they probably had leftover ballot envelopes from before we were able to start using pen. So rather than, say, spend taxpayer money printing new envelopes, they simply kept using the ones for which they had already bought and paid.
Indeed: "The primary reason was strictly economic," said a County Elections spokesperson by telephone this morning. While they recently adopted ballot reader machines which can read either pen or pencil, they found themselves with 800,000 secrecy envelopes still remaining from the pencil-only days. And so they opted to continue using those "as an economy measure."
"We apologize for the inconvenience," the spokesperson said. Voters safely can, at this point, use either pen or pencil.
Imagine what either Stanford or some other columnist would have written had it instead transpired that the County had ordered thousands upon thousands of new envelopes, with taxpayer money, just because we could now use pen and the envelopes didn't say that. I bet whatever they wrote, it would have been (let me guess!) snarky in a "government's being stupid" sort of way.
When all it would have taken was a 60-second telephone call to the County Elections Division, prompted by just a little bit of forethought.
Update
The following just came in via email from John Kauffman, Director of Elections for Multnomah County: "It would have cost us about $8,000 for this election to reprint the secrecy envelopes. I made the decision to not reprint until they're used up."