Make sure absentee ballot is OK

Take a look at your absentee ballot. If it’s blank on one side, you’d better turn it in to the county Elections Office for a new one.

Four ballots — three on Shaw, one on San Juan — have been found with printing on only one side, Elections Supervisor Dan Gillespie said. Those voters received new ballots; Gillespie said he doesn’t know if more goofed ballots are out there.

When the press was printing the other side of the ballots, it grabbed two ballots at once, according to Sally Andrews of Ballots & Business Forms in Tacoma. Consequently, only one side — the one showing two state initiatives and the county levy — was printed. The other side — the one showing local races and levy requests — was blank.

“This may be all of them,” Gillespie said of the four bad ballots.

However, the real test comes on Election Day. Gillespie’s office mailed out 5,788 ballots, of which 1,747 were returned as of Oct. 27. Shaw Island’s entire ballot is a mail-only ballot. Any incompletely printed ballots will be rejected by the voting machine.

“It happens,” said Gillespie, a former printer, about the printing goof. Gillespie said election workers will check ballots carefully before they are handed out or mailed. Bottom line: If one side of your ballot is blank, call the Elections Office, 378-3357.

All told, 37 positions in the county are on the Nov. 4 ballot — from

school boards and cemetery districts to town council and port commission. Countywide, voters will decide whether to raise the county property tax to 97 cents per $1,000 of assessed property valuation. The money would be used to cover the cost of operations, capital and technology improvements.

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