Proofreading is dead, but it’s not a Republican conspiracy.
Just over 250 election ballots mailed to military and overseas voters by officials in Palm Beach County, Florida, contained a small but significant typo: Tim Walz, the Democratic candidate for vice president, was nowhere to be found. In his place was “Tom Walz.” The error came to light when a concerned voter sent a screenshot of their ballot to the New York Times. “The error was isolated to 257 electronic ballots,” Wendy Sartory Link, the county’s elections supervisor, told the newspaper, attributing the error to a vendor that made a “manual typed change.” … "The error in no way affects the proper tabulation of any of the electronic ballots and every vote will count as the voter intended,” Link said.
The purpose of these easily discovered mistakes may not be getting away with anything. The actual purpose may be to establish a created pattern of mistakes to show a people (and perhaps the judiciary) that voting cannot be trusted.
Does it? It’s not as if the election is going to be decided because one of 250 overseas voters got a ballot that said “Tom Walz” and decided to vote for Trump instead. And in both cases the mistakes were spotted promptly and are being fixed. You have to try really hard to read something nefarious into this.
The GOP has played the game of putting a similar named guy on the ballot before to siphon off votes for the dem candidate. Mind you, this is not a huge deal. like leaving Harris name off. let us see what the next boo-boo will be.
“Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.”
As said by Auric Goldfinger in Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger.
I agree that there should be questions asked, but I don’t think that any voter would be thrown too much by “Tom Walz.” It’s not like they put “Tony Woltz” on the ballot.
But these things should also be checked, double-checked, triple-checked, and then checked yet again before the printing presses roll, and those doing the checking must be politically neutral; or, at the very least, a group comprised of an equal number of Ds and Rs, with a few Independents thrown in for good measure. Both the “Tom Walz” misspelling and the Harris exclusion from Montanan ballots should have been caught the first time. And if not then, then on subsequent examinations.
If they were that smart they would have eliminated Trump’s name. Trump would still win Montana and they could point to it as the Dems trying to steal the election.
I’m with @Smapti that it’s just mistakes. As stupid as the Republicans are they are unlikely to try to fix a race that they are already going to win in such a ham handed way.
As for the Tim vs Tom, it would be an easy mistake to make, and miss in editing and will have absolutely no effect on the election. Its so minor that it doesn’t even reach the point of calling the process into question.
Presidential slates are written as Kamala Harris/Tim Walz. A typo in Tim could easily go ignored: eyes would sail right over it. Those are the hardest errors to check when proofreading or copyediting. A voter wanting to vote Democratic will look for Kamala Harris. The person after the slash could be Tim Allen or Tom Brady or Mit Walz or Mitt Romney.
In addition, seeing mistakes on a computer screen has a reputation of being harder to see than on paper.
That doesn’t excuse the mistake. As @Spoons indicated, whoever programmed the electronic ballots needed to have thrown a battalion of eyes onto the ballot before it went out. Everybody sees more than anybody.
Nobody has mentioned that Palm Beach County is where Mar-a-Lago is located. Trump is voting early. Where’s the CT that they rigged the error to make Trump giggle when he voted?
Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen said Tuesday that he has “no plans to call a special session” to change the way the state allocates electoral votes to a winner-take-all system, ending an effort led by Donald Trump.
The announcement comes after Republican state Sen. Mike McDonnell said he would not support a last-ditch effort to overturn the law that awards electoral votes based by congressional district.
While I agree the two examples discussed are, in all likelihood, mistakes, I do not believe they are “just” mistakes.
By that, I mean if they had gone the other way, they would have been discovered and stopped. As they were both against the Dems I think it is more likely than not that one or more of the reviewers who had to sign off on the ballot simply made sure the “Trump” part was correct and never even noticed the “Harris” part. Inattentional blindness, I think they call it. Kind of like the test where you don’t see the gorilla when you are tasked to count the number of basketball passes.
No malice, so it was accidental. It wasn’t merely an accident, though. Subliminal forces were at work, IMO.