WEST HAVEN, UTAH — A California mail-in ballot has traveled over 1,400 miles, including a stop in Utah, to be counted in next week’s election.
It was mailed from a home in South Lake Tahoe, California. Beverly Delos Reyes signed it last Thursday and it was supposed to go to the voter registrar’s office in Placerville, California.
After she stuck the ballot in the mail, it was postmarked the same day in Reno, but somehow it ended up over 700 miles away at Leland Neil’s office in West Haven, Utah. “That’s what got me,” Neil said. “I was looking on the front and it says, ‘Placerville, California’ and I was like, ‘How’d it get to Utah?’ ”
It turns out the ballot had somehow traveled across parts of three states and ended up in the pile of mail delivered to his workplace two days ago. Read more
Notice the two barcodes on the letter. Machines move the mail now because it’s faster. Except when the machines make a mistake which is what happened here. Somewhere the automation sent the letter through a machine that reads the address and spray paints a barcode on it to send it to its destination. What happen, the ballot was stuck on a letter that should have had the barcode painted on. Could have been from tape people use to seal letters. It happens all the time. When it got to the machine that printed the barcode on it, the two letters separated and the ballot received the second barcode. It’s the top barcode which the machines read first. It made it all the way to the place where the top barcode is for until a person, the carrier, pulled it out of his automated mail. Every carrier gets letters like this on a daily basis. Again, It happens daily. Sometimes you get one or two…..sometimes twenty to thirty. The advantage to the machines is what use to take three to four weeks to send a letter from coast to coast now takes five to seven days average. I’ve seen letters mailed from South Carolina to California get there in two days. It’s amazing. The disadvantage is when a wrong barcode is printed and it loops around for days. It’s the cost of using automation. Same thing happens with packages. Sometimes a person reuses a box that still has a barcode it. Depending on which side the box faces the machines that sort them is where the package goes. If there are two barcodes on different sides, the package could loop around from one side of the country to the other until a person marks out the wrong barcode. Again. It’s how automation works.