Funny how the 'mistakes' always are reported as nothing-to-see-here by the press, yet somehow always favor the Democrats. The formula is as predictable as the sun coming up in the morning.

So here we have another one, this time in San Diego County.

According to the Epoch Times:

SAN DIEGO—The San Diego County Registrar of Voters office found that around 1 percent of voters for the Nov. 7 special election may have received duplicate ballots, it was announced Oct. 11.

According to the registrar, the mistake impacts voters in the county Board of Supervisors District 4 special election and less than a dozen voters in the city of Chula Vista special election.

Following the discovery of the duplicate ballots, the registrar's office "immediately contacted the print and mailing vendor to determine what happened and how many voters were impacted," according to a statement from the office. "After researching, they reported that around 7,500 or a little over 1% of voters out of the nearly 600,000 voters who were mailed a ballot, have inadvertently received a duplicate mail ballot packet."

Which is weird stuff. How does anyone "mistakenly" send duplicate ballots in a hotly contested local election? 

And this one, a county race for District 4 supervisor, which is one I will vote in, quite unlike the statewide elections, really does offer a choice of candidates; one of which is a crazed leftist wokester fixated on reparations and swamp-like public spending named Monica Montgomery-Steppe, and the other of whom is a moderate conservative named Amy Reichert who wants to clean up the streets, enforce fiscal discipline, and restore normality to the semi-blue city.

Ordinarily, California voters get a choice of only the top two leftists from the primaries in the general election, with each striving to out-woke the other on the ballot, leaving conservatives without representation on ridiculous ballots full of unvote-able candidates. This one, though, is different. That there's a choice in this election, and internal polls likely show that voters are sick of the crime, the newly dumped illegals, and the homeless disorder in the streets, meaning the contest may actually be a close one. That raises the odds that the Democrat side is going to try to cheat, particularly if the margin of victory may be narrow. What Democrat wouldn't try to put their thumb on the scales given the minimal effort of securing just a few more ballots, and given what's at stake for them?

Which, lucky them, has coincided with 7,500 double sets of ballots "accidentally" mailed out to voters in California's junk-mail elections. Yes, some questions should be asked.

Hey, it's only 1% of the ballots, won't affect anything, right, not even in a tight election? That's the media's "nothing to see here" line.

Somehow, it's a reportable story, but don't concern your pretty little heads about it, that's the mainstream media is "line" in a lot of these stories. Bzzt. Wrong response, there are going to be questions. 

Nevertheless, some of the digging was done by NBC7, which is a pretty biased-leftward news station, but did better reporting than the others.

In a video report by Omari Fleming, available here, we learned that a contractor was blamed for the error; an Everett, Washington state private company named K&H Printing Solutions, whose website says it has a subsidiary named K&H Election Services.  

Who owns that company? Hard to say, given that its "about" page seems to have been once there but has since been blocked with a "server error" or been deleted. But some searching around reveals that its CEO is a longtime employee named Jay Ackley and its elections chief is another longtime employee named Erika Bean. They probably know their business very, very well, which could be either a good thing or a bad thing if that means they know where the vulnerabilities are.

Are they or their company Democrat donors? Far as I can tell, they aren't, I checked the federal databases, including odd variations of their names and even just the donors from the city of Everett, Washington. I got nothing. So that may be a point in their favor even though they live in deep blue Washington.

We also learned that Fleming found a voter in the Hillcrest neighborhood, which is probably the bluest neighborhood of San Diego, saying that he got two ballots, but of course, he wasn't worried. Fleming also interviewed two other voters who said they were worried, but they didn't get two ballots.

Why did the double-ballots go into the blue neighborhoods? Fleming seemed to know that his viewers would be asking that, so he hastened to say that the double-ballots were dispersed through the city, not saying how he knew that or whether his source might have a vested interest in seeing Democrats elected. He also didn't mention whether these other neighborhoods were also all-blue neighborhoods. All we have is one voter with two ballots in a very blue neighborhood, which would be useful if a Democrat candidate wanted to pad the total. That tilts a little towards the questionable side. Could a conservative have gotten two ballots, too, which might neutralize the potential for fraud and point to incompetence instead? We don't know.

Fleming, along with the rest of the press, cited the County Registrar of Voters as assuring that nobody would get two shots of votes from two ballots, as they had "safeguards" within the system to invalidate one of the mailings. They would ask the voters to discard one of the ballots on the honor system, negate out any second vote through the bar code on the envelope if any nevertheless did cast two ballots, and all would be hunky dory. I have not found any information about whether it would really work that way, or if more "mistakes" could come of this, or if they would really do it at all. They ought to do such a negation on camera for the benefit of the voters, but of course, they won't. We'll just have to take their word for it. It's worth more questions.

As for K&H, the extra 7,500 ballots are being blamed on their error. That's not a good look for a company that claims on the front page of its website to be "perfect&timely." Really? Assuming this was their error, they're not perfect. They would be more credible if they said they 'strive to be perfect' than are perfect, because a Google search shows that actually, they do make errors.

In 2010, San Francisco voters got the wrong ballots -- the bar code was mismatched on the ballot and the envelope and they had to do a do-over and that was blamed on K&H. It's unknown if anybody got to vote more than once from that. 

In 2021, in Ventura County, voters got erroneous notification messages about the status of their ballot, and again, K&H was blamed. The County claimed that nobody's ballot in the counting was affected. So we'll have to take their word for it.

They definitely shouldn't be calling themselves "perfect" from stories like these if the election officials are correct in their blame. 

But the initial finding about them, that they don't seem linked to Democrats, throws some water on that fire, because the really fraudy stuff comes not from a printer, who is on the "input" side, but from a printer and an election official or Democrat party operative colluding together on the input side, or on the output side, similar colluding with a Democrat party operative. There is no evidence of any of that with K&H. That means the errors were probably just ... errors, and not a plan to steal an election.

I read an excellent piece in California Sunday magazine describing the business conditions and operating systems of ballot printing companies, and while it was written by a lefty New York Times magazine contributor, did show how intricate the process is, as well as the potential for errors that can be unintentional. It described the business conditions printing companies operate in -- I could see from this California Association of Clerks and Election Officials 2014 conference attendance list that they are numerous and competitive and could have an incentive to downplay their mistakes as a result.

The piece mars itself a bit by dismissing the potential for election fraud, citing the uhh, mere 204 instances of known voting fraud the Heritage Foundation has documented, unintentionally negating their own argument. Election fraud is indeed real. But the piece is persuasive in showing that errors originating from the printer, or input side of a mail-ballot election, can be real, too.   

The mainstream media is not going to report or explain any of this, so it's up to vigilant citizens to watch carefully if the election is close, and then go over the points of weakness in an objective way if it is close.

Thus far, we have questions that call for better transparency and less dismissiveness of voter concerns, but there is no smoking gun.

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