At Runbeck, one of the largest
ballot printers in the country, it
took about 45 minutes to convert a roll
of paper into 20,000 ballots. Once bal-
lots came off the press, those bound for
absentee voters were bundled with other
materials, like instruction sheets and ‘‘I
Voted’’ stickers.
Getting all those mail-in ballots pro-
cessed and out to voters in time was a
grueling eff ort, undertaken largely out
of sight, but it was a crucial part of the
mail-in voting process. ‘‘If ballot printers
do the job well, nobody notices,’’ said
Jeff Ellington, the president of Runbeck.
‘‘But if you have an error on a ballot, it’s
international news.’’
There were isolated glitches. In Allegh-
eny County, Pa., nearly 29,000 voters were
sent the wrong mail-in ballot; in Florida,
voters reported getting ballots with their
return envelopes already sealed shut; in
three counties in eastern Wisconsin, a tiny
printing error on some 13,000 absentee
ballots rendered them unreadable by vote-
scanning machines. Absentee ballots can
be subject to such misprints and missteps;
they often include security measures that
make them more complicated than those
cast at polling places with volunteers
ready to help. They can require things
like inner secrecy envelopes, signed outer
envelopes and witness signatures.
But even under the heightened scrutiny
of a contested election, any paper ballot
provides tangible evidence of intent:
most important, the pen marks made by
the voter. Look more closely, though, and
there, on the paper, is proof of other peo-
ple’s intentions, too — those who brought
the ballot into being, who painstakingly
printed, cut and folded it just so, in the
process transforming a simple sheet of
paper into an instrument of democracy.
Ballots on their way to be cut and stacked at
Michigan Election Resources.