Some absentee ballots lacked St. Petersburg city initiatives
By MICHAEL SANDLER
Published October 27, 2004
LARGO - About 250 absentee ballots mailed to voters in St. Petersburg did not include the second page of the ballot, officials for the Pinellas County Supervisor of Elections said Tuesday.
Lori Hudson, a spokeswoman for the office, said election officials received a telephone call and an e-mail from voters alerting them to the omission.
"When we went back through and looked through the batches returned, we discovered several of the districts were light," Hudson said. "We did not open them. We weighed them. By weight, we could tell they only contained one page."
Hudson said the second page, which contained ballot initiatives for the city of St. Petersburg, was mailed to affected voters Monday.
The office paid $691 to resend them, including return postage.
The office will go through the returned second pages and match them up with their original ballots. Both pages require the name of the voter, Hudson said.
The projected number of affected ballots represents 0.3 percent of the approximately 80,000 absentee ballots issued so far this year and 0.04 percent of the the 590,989 registered voters in Pinellas.
The actual number of affected ballots is undetermined.
"That is an estimate," Hudson said. "We are right at around (250). We could have sent a second page to someone who is not going to vote. Some of those may have received a second page, but chose not to send it back. We would rather err on the side of caution."
