Sunday, June 5, 2011

When Will Bureaucracies Operate Logically?

Oh what a disappointment. There I was thinking that there was an exciting aspect to the Denver mayoral elections in that we were about to discover that some electoral fraud and manipulation was afoot, only to discover that it was an element of semi-literacy that was at fault!


These elections use mail-in ballots and when my daughter and son in law both got letters from the electoral office telling them that both their signatures were irregular so their ballots for the May run off had been rejected, my antenna immediately went up. Aha, I said to myself, it means one of the candidates' campaign team had been vigilant enough to do a canvas of the area that they resided in and based on their assessment of how the two residents of the household would vote, they had arranged by some devious means to have their ballots rejected!

Wow, I thought, so there is some intrigue in these otherwise boring elections. I therefore encouraged them to visit the electoral office to find our exactly why 100% of the voters in one household was rejected!

So off we went on Friday last to the electoral office and I really found the experience there quite amusing. As we entered, there was an old lady dressed like a parson (that funny white collar) sitting by the door with a ballot box. I soon learned why she appeared so happy to see us for the big room we entered had ballot boxes, lots of voting machines, people behind the counter but no customers or should I say, voters.

She seemed disappointed that we had not come to drop our mail in ballot in her box which would have given her some form of activity in that she would have had to deliver stickers saying 'I voted." When she heard our problem, she told us to take a number. I wondered if there were invisible persons around for since no one else required assistance from the bored looking staff members behind the counter, I just could not understand the 'take a number ' routine.

Anyway, as the number was drawn, about four of the six people behind the counter offered to help.
You could see that they had not had to deal with other members of the public for a long time, for normally bureaucrats are never anxious to help anyone, but these guys were bored.


While the two enumerated voters explained their problem to a lady behind the counter, a male senior citizen who was also there anxious to help, listened to the complaint about their signatures being rejected, then said to me, "Without checking, I know what the problem is." He said they have around 3% of the ballots rejected at each election because of the problem and he had been trying to convince the 'powers that be' to do a simple adjustment for years but they don't listen to him.

He then showed me the mail-in envelope. In it is the ballot, a big white sheet of paper marked :"secrecy sleeve" to cover the ballot and an envelope in which the ballot and sleeve is to be enclosed and posted to the electoral office. On the back of the envelope, the voter is required to sign an Affidavit, stating among other things, that he is an eligible voter and that the signature and name on the envelope is his/hers. The problem the 3% has however, is that they do not read the envelope properly for if they did, they would realise that they would have to find the name they are saying is theirs!

However, you would never believe where they have hidden the name. It is written upside down just above the addressee on the front of the envelope and is surrounded by bar codes. So if you do not look properly, you just do not see your name. As a result, where there is more than one voter in a household, it is easy to just grab any envelope, mark the ballot and sign the back without checking whose name is written upside down on the front!

This is what the gentleman says he has trying to address over the years. Neither he nor I could understand why the voter's name could not be placed at the back where the person is required to sign. The only explanation we could come up with is that bureaucrats just do not think or operate logically.

So when the other clerk checked why the signatures had been rejected, naturally it was for the same reason the man had outlined....they had signed without checking that the envelope they were signing had the correct name.


According to my wise informant, the 3% rejection of mail in ballots could be eliminated easily and he added that what was troubling is that when the majority of voters are informed that their ballots are rejected, they don't bother to pursue it, unlike my kin. They wanted to vote so they took the trouble to go to the office to sort it out whereas most people don't. And that only makes the number of persons who vote in these elections even smaller, ranging from 20-30% in an election for mayor, he told me.

The system does offer several opportunities to get it right, for the voting period is two weeks and if one votes early, when he /she receives an advice that something is wrong, they have more than a week to make the correction. But very few people are prepared to put up with the hassle caused by upside down names.

What this reinforced for me is that no where in the world is the bureaucracy prepared to make life simple and hassle free!


 And there I was thinking that convoluted bureaucracies were endemic to Jamaica!

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