Here in Georgia, in Gwinnett County (NE metro), it seems there's an issue with some of the printed ballots - they won't scan. The solution? Have folks manually transfer the votes to ballots that the scanner will accept.
http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/...
When Gwinnett County designed its absentee ballot, someone made the oval voters 'fill in' to make their choices too thick.
To the naked eye, the oval looked normal. But when election workers ran a test ballot through the scanner, the machine returned an error message. It seems the scanner interpreted the thickened oval as a filled-in vote. To the machine, every oval was filled in.
Gwinnett County spokesman Joe Sorenson calls the blunder an honest mistake.
"I had a chance to actually look at the print screens today to see how someone could make the mistake , and I can see myself doing it but I can't see anyone else ever doing it again after we discovered this," says Sorenson.
Workers will have to manually transfer votes from affected ballots to new ones. By law, that process can't begin until Election Day.
Jim Burress, WABE News.
One hopes that there is proper oversight over this process. The temptation for a strong supporter of either candidate or party to, ah, "adjust" a ballot when filling in a new copy of the ballot form may be too strong to resist. Let's hope the folks tapped for this task are above such temptations.
Edit: It doesn't say in the posted story, but I seem to recall hearing the number 19,000 mentioned when I heard this on the radio this morning, as far as the estimated total of affected ballots. I'm not sure if that was total printed, or total received.