CA election officials take rubber erasers to 100K mail-in ballots! WHAT?

I don't see how this can be OK. All ballots should remain unmolested by officials. If the computers have a hard time reading them, count them by HAND. Geeeez!

By Erik Silk and Christina Farr; Peninsula Press

Drake Martinet

County workers used erasers to manually correct the smudge errors on every affected ballot.

Santa Clara County election officials Tuesday shrugged off a printing flaw that caused some 100,000 ballots to be rejected by optical scanning machines, even as county employees worked overtime to scrub each and every ballot by hand, using rubber erasers.

Elma Rosas, a spokesman for the Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters, said that even though the majority of mail-in ballots were affected by the printing flaw, the issue had been largely resolved. "The computers were letting us know there was an issue," Rosas said Tuesday night. "We looked at those 100,000, and we just took care of it."

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/inthepeninsula/detail?entry_id=76165#ixzz14CAe5aOX