BradBlog

Luckily, it's "only" Florida.

More than 12,500 voters received robocalls this morning from the Pinellas County, FL Supervisor of Elections office, letting them know that the deadline for turning in their absentee ballot was "tomorrow", the day after the election. Unfortunately, the real deadline for turning in absentee ballots is 7pm today, Election Day, Tuesday, November 6th.

Pinellas County is home to Tampa and St. Petersburg. So here's why this monumental screw-up, presuming that's what it was, seems to have happened...

According to the Tampa Bay Times ^[1]...

ST. PETERSBURG — Pinellas elections officials now say that 12,525 people were wrongly telephoned this morning with a message that they had until 7 p.m. "tomorrow" to turn in their absentee ballots.

Here's what happened, according to Nancy Whitlock, a spokeswoman for supervisor Deb Clark:

Pinellas officials used a Internet phone system called CallFire.com, to record messages reminding people of the deadline to turn in mail-in ballots.

On Monday, election officials sent out a reminder to 27,917 people saying ballots must be returned by 7 p.m. "tomorrow" — or Tuesday. But for reasons unknown, 12,525 of those calls wound up in a queue and were not placed until between 8 and 8:30 a.m. this morning.

By then, "tomorrow," referred incorrectly to Wednesday.