Your vote was worth 200,000

[skysidhe]

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (Nov. 11) - An absentee ballot was mailed with what may have been a rare stamp worth as much as $200,000 -- the famous Inverted Jenny -- but the envelope is in a box that by law can't be opened.

Broward County Commissioner John Rodstrom discovered the stamp while reviewing absentee ballots. There was no name on the envelope, so the vote didn't count.

What looked like a small stamp collection on one envelope caught Rodstrom's eye about 8 p.m. Tuesday. At least one was from 1936, Rodstrom said. Then he noticed one had an upside-down World War I-era airplane - the hallmark of an Inverted Jenny.

"I was a stamp collector when I was little," Rodstrom told The Miami Herald. "I recognized it."

Rodstrom discussed the stamp with other members of the canvassing board, and a stamp-collecting Broward County sheriff's deputy overheard them talking about the possible Jenny.

He said the stamp would be very valuable if it was real. But it was too late.

"By that time we had already sealed the box. And once you seal the box, under the election law you can't unseal it," Broward County Court Judge Eric Beller said.

Elections officials will retain the ballot for 22 months, Jenny Nash, a spokeswoman for the Florida secretary of state's office, told The Associated Press. After that, any action is up to the county elections supervisor.

A telephone message left with Fred Bellis, the executive assistant to Broward County Supervisor of Elections Brenda Snipes, was not immediately returned Saturday.

Snipes' spokeswoman, Mary Cooney, said the supervisor is too busy with balloting to focus on the stamp. Cooney said ballots and materials are usually destroyed after the 22-month holding period.

"She's (Snipes) not going to be able to take any time to even look at it until after the (ballot) certification on Monday," Cooney told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.

Maynard Guss, president of the Sunrise Stamp Club, said an Inverted Jenny, if authentic, could be worth $200,000. But when the ballot was mailed the stamp was canceled, reducing its value. Guss estimated a canceled Jenny would likely sell for $20,000 to $100,000.

The 24-cent Jenny stamps were printed in 1918. Sheets were run through presses twice to process all the colors and on one pass, four went through backward. Inspectors caught the errors on three sheets and destroyed them, but somehow, a sheet of 100 stamps got through.

Stamp collectors have spent 88 years trying to find them all.


11/11/06 16:12 EST

[Griff]

...and didn't count. It seems like someone was making a statement, but I can't decipher it.

[skysidhe]

I personally think grandma and grandpa didn't have a stamp and they had not been out of the house for a very very long time. oh, I think they went a rummagin in the old oak desk that required a skeleton key to get into. :p

[xoxoxoBruce]

I wonder if it was a current absentee ballot envelope? With multiple stamps on the envelope, it may have missed the cancellation....maybe.

[skysidhe]

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

I wonder if it was a current absentee ballot envelope? With multiple stamps on the envelope, it may have missed the cancellation....maybe.

If it was cancelled it's still worth $20,000 to $100,000.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Yeah, but more gooder if it's not.

[skysidhe]

hehe ya gooder!


wow, we'll never find out...she'll be too busy going to the bank.


Well just have to dream.

[DanaC]

So.....explain to me why the absentee ballots aren't just conted along with the rest?

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Originally Posted by DanaC

So.....explain to me why the absentee ballots aren't just conted along with the rest?

The ballots just take a bit more handling, and it's in large part manual; the envelopes they're in have to be opened. Absentee ballots would have been handled a bit more smoothly this month had they come in in greater quantity before election day, is the opinion in California. A couple of local offices are still hanging in the balance, one by a difference of six votes, so we're being, shall we say, meticulous. The local Department of Elections found itself suddenly snowed under with 71,000 absentee ballots that they'd hoped to be seeing over a couple of weeks previous to our traditional first-Tuesday-in-November-that-isn't-1-November election day.

In our county, the paper ballots are then fed through an optical scanner, which is talented enough to read the ballots backwards, forwards, or upside down accurately, so pretty much all that has to happen is to get the ballots out of the envelopes, unfolded, and stuck in the scanner's slot. Inside a second per ballot sheet the gizmo has read and tabulated the votes on the ballot, which then goes into storage for a couple of years, by statutory requirement. These will vary by state -- the Federal government has little to say on the detailed requirements, anti-fraud measures, and the like.

They are used if they are needed to break a tie/close election.

That is a beauty... I am a lightweight philatelist. Love that stamp.

[DanaC]

But.....okay, maybe I am just being silly, but why not just count them from the start? Why wait for a tie-break situation? They are peoples' votes.....

You are not being silly.
This is why I put myself through a great deal of pain sometimes, like this year, to vote in person.

[DanaC]

Ahh. I see.

We have 'postal ballots' here, which people can elect to have instead of going to the ballot stations. It's particularly useful for pensioners or people with motility issues. All our ballot papers are checked and counted manually though.

When I was elected in the local elections, we went along to the count. There were stations set up all around the sports hall. and two tellers on each station counting through the ballot papers. We had someone stood in front of each counting point, watching as they separated them into the different piles, based on which box the cross had been marked in, and were supposed to shout up if we thought they'd got one wrong. The postal ballots were all opened at the same time and fed into the count. Out of the 4000 ballot papers for my ward (there were I think 20 wards being counted in that room) there were 9 that were unclear. They were st to one side and atthe end of the count, myself and my competitors were called over to examine them. We came to a decision as to whether that slightly skewed cross was meant to be on that name, or the other double cross with one scribbled out meant that name.... we discounted 5 as genuine spoiled ballots and argued our case as to whether the others could be counted or not. Was fun:P

[Griff]

update- forged stamp

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Originally Posted by DanaC

We have 'postal ballots' here, which people can elect to have instead of going to the ballot stations. It's particularly useful for pensioners or people with motility issues. All our ballot papers are checked and counted manually though.

When I was elected in the local elections, we went along to the count. . . Out of the 4000 ballot papers for my ward (there were I think 20 wards being counted in that room) there were 9 that were unclear. . . we discounted 5 as genuine spoiled ballots and argued our case as to whether the others could be counted or not. Was fun:P

Congratulations on getting elected to the office you ran for; way cool.

Yeah, it's really very much the same as this on our side of the pond, and our left-hand side of the continent, official terminology varying, naturally enough, by state: absentee ballot = postal ballot, and is similarly either mailed in, or optionally dropped off in a sealed bag especially for the purpose at any voting precinct in the voter's county of residence -- the rule is you have to do it in your own county. Voting precinct = ward, though more easterly states may use ward. Polling place = ballot station. We also use the term spoiled ballot; our voters get three tries to get it right -- I think there was a time when we once had a lot more drunken voters than is the case nowadays. Nineteenth-century oiling of the electoral machinery -- and the electorate. I've also seen illiterate voters -- Spanish speakers in these cases.

This year is the first year our county went to electronic voting machines; previously ballot cards were IBM punch card things with all the punch holes in a row down the edges and the necessary print bits down the middle, punched with a mechanical puncher on a sliding handle with a mechanism to locate the punch accurately on the for/against or the punch simply... wouldn't. These were called the Datavote punches. The things made a distinctive and now fondly recalled sound in use -- zikk zikk, kachunk, zikk, kachunk -- now the sound of civic involvement is an electronic twitter-tweet, melodious in its own way. It seems less prone to voter error than one interesting development I saw a couple years back: somebody didn't notice the instruction on the Datavote punch-card ballot that said only put one card in the Datavote punch at a time. This young Hercules got all six of the ballot cards into the Datavote at once and drove the punch through every one of 'em. Spoiled ballot!

The punched ballots then went, in ballot boxes under due security, to the County Elections Division for running through punch-card readers. All that's gone now, with optical scanners taking over the job and tabulating the votes right in the precinct's polling place, with Elections then reading and tabulating together the records established by the ballot box electronic scanners, which work about like those optical-scan test forms where you fill in bubbles with soft pencil -- these use black ink, not Sharpie or felt tip as these may bleed through, to complete parted black graphic arrows pointing to the voter's choices. They don't need much of a mark to register, and will immediately kick back a mismarked or over-voted ballot card, duly noting it in a record tape like cash register tape. They are hoping these improvements will allow Elections Department to get home before four the next morning -- they're getting closer, it's said. Electronic count will not completely supplant a hand count, if called for; but the party calling for it pays for the costs.