I am just agape at what another Loyal Reader just sent me. Apparently, the School District in Hudson has decided to blithely just mail out their ballots to everyone in town.
Dear Hudson voter,
Due to a delay in the printing of the School Ballot, we have included a copy of the School ballot along with the original Town ballot for you to fill out. As these are only copies of the School ballot, they will have to be hand counted on election night. Your Town ballot will be run through the machines per the usual process. Waiting for the School ballot would not have allowed the proper time for absentee voters to complete the process. In order to assure that you r ballot get (sic) to us on time, you may want to consider sending it by Priority or Next Day Delivery mail. These options would require additional postage.
Your vote is important to us and we wanted to ensure you had the opportunity make your vote count. If you have any questions, feel free to give the office a c
Thank you.
Roger Ordway
Interim Town Clerk
And yes, either a couple of words are missing (right margin ended too soon?) or someone was pulling a Skip and fingers couldn’t keep up with the thinking part. However, note this part:
As these are only copies of the school ballot, they will have to be hand counted on election night.
I’ve asked for said Loyal Reader to call me because I have more than a few questions on this, like:
- If these have to be hand counted, does this mean these are only paper?
- If just paper (and not the Accu-vote type ballots, by whose authority were these created and sent out? Did the AG Election Office (sigh…) give the OK? Or are the Hudson Powers That Be using some authorizing RSA in order to do this? Or is this a “by the seat of our pants” operation hoping people wouldn’t notice or make it known (Ding-dongs if they really thought this with Windham going on)?
- AND! If just paper, what is to prevent illegal (WOULD it be illegal???) copying of these paper ballots in order to “stuff the box”? Are there any watermarks that are hard to duplicate with “ordinary” equipment of the day?
- And if the person is going to mail it in, what is the Chain of Custody such that ballots are coming ONLY from legal voters? What protective measures are in play?
- How are they going to tell if mailed in ballots have either been injected into or removed from the mail stream?
I could go on with more but this already, on top of the Windham Machine Incident as well as Nov 3rd, is just plain nuts.
I admit, I’m assuming a lot here because I don’t have a lot to go on and I can’t call the Hudson Interim Town Clerk, Roger Ordway as today is Sunday.
I can admit that I may be way off base here BUT stranger things happen in NH elections.
You can be sure, however, that I will be calling tomorrow. Town Meetings are about to happen all over NH – how many other towns got caught with their “ballot pants” down?
