So the double ballot thing sure seems like a dirty trick to me. The elephants have had their sleazier operatives send in phony voter registration cards for a whole buch of known donkeys. The other shoe will drop when they challenge BOTH ballots as the counting process begins. If the elections division counts one of the two ballots, the elephants will scream fraud and sue. Nixon's dirty trick machine lives on!

If you are military or overseas (doesn't sound like you are?) you may have gotten a ballot with Nader on it. If this is the case, according to that link, the second ballot should be a "president only" ballot, which you can ignore if you aren't planning on voting for Nader. If you are voting for Nader, you should put his name on the second "president only" ballot as a write-in, and leave the president section of the first ballot blank.

I doubt this is the case for you, but I thought I'd relay this information just in case.

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It started in Oregon about 1988, and reports say it's being done in Florida and other states this year, when the GOP pays the postage to send all registered R's an absentee ballot.

The first time or two, as is easy to imagine, the R. voting response spiked up and many surprise upsets were elected in the sneak. The D. response was to copy the tactic, instead of stopping loophole; and soon all R's and D's were getting absentee ballots, and so then the vote-by-mail movement got its momentum and won.

Which now, in the end, when everyone has a ballot and a vote, fair and square, has worked against the R's in whittling away their deadwood each biennium. And sent them stalking in and around elections regulations to try to find their next sneak, their next cheat, anything to get some illicit extra for themselves and prevent a straightforward fair election.

So, I've wondered sometimes if the R's (and the D's) ever stopped buying a round of ballots being stovepiped to their group, and shut down that mailing list.

Any pattern in the double ballots -- they're everywhere, they're everywhere -- might be seen if some specifics about each occurrence was collated. Here at BlueOregon, say.

So, all you who know someone who got double ballots? What party affiliation is on their registration card?

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I also got two ballots. When I went down to vote in the primaries in May, I had to make a special trip down to the election office to get a ballot, and gave them my address at the time.

A few weeks ago, I got a call from the Democratic Party, telling me that when they'd tried to find me as a registered voter, they couldn't - according to Multnomah County, I needed to have a full and complete address, and I'd left off the 'official' apartment number. (I live on the first floor of a house, so never use the number since mail gets here without it...)

So I called Multnomah County the next day...the guy found my listing, and appended the record to add that apartment number. He seemed confused as to whether or not I really needed to do it, but he changed the record anyway.

You guessed it: I got two ballots, one with the number, the other without.

We live in Yamhill county and my husband got 3, count 'em, 3 ballots for this election. He called the Yamhill County elections office and they told him that he should just send in one ballot. I think he's planning to send it in early so he can check after a few days to make sure he gets counted correctly. Maybe it's some sort of cosmic balance - last election we each got 2 - one for our current county and one for the one we had moved out of a year and a half prior. We seem destined to end up with 4 ballots per election between the 2 of us. Good thing we are ethical people and only vote once (despite wishing we could cancel out more Bush voters!).

Sounds like a serious computer glitch to me. I know people are reluctant to have their social security numbers tied to things other than Social Security, but perhaps voter registration ought to be tied to that, which would make duplicates easy to find. I mean, many people have the same name, so how are they supposed to recognize duplicates based on name? And since something like 18% of Americans move each year (not to mention how many change their names by getting married or divorced), a computer glitch like this could pose some very serious problems. But each of us has a unique SS#. How hard can it be to reprogram the system for that? A lot of the people's SS#s would be available from Dept. of Revenue, and surely someone could come up with an efficient way of rounding up the rest of them.

I still haven't gotten a reply from the elections people, BUT my favorite thing about this was... the week before I got my ballot, I received a couple different glossy publications from the "Yes on 36" people with pictures of happy heterosexual couples and their happy apple-cheeked children and "mother and father" and Gordon Smith and blah blah blah marriage blah blah blah which I found really depressing... until I turned to the back page where my address was printed and saw it had been sent to.....

Erika & Erika Meyer

Hey! I'm a same-sex couple!

Finally! someone to help with childrearing, housework!
Maybe now I can finally hit a PTA meeting...

My husband is also part of a same-sex couple, according to the Yes on the 36 brochure that he received addressed to "Michael & Michael." But wait--he's married to me too! Does that make him a gay/straight polygamist? I'm not sure the Yes on 36 people would even want his vote, if that's the case.

This has nothing to do with Republican dirty tricks! Their is no distinction between an absentee and regular ballot in Oregon.

The likely result is that the mailing system is pritning out two labels for you, these labels and envelopes are produced and mailed automatically. Direct mail companies make this mistake all the time.

Should election officials do better? Of course they should. But stop pointing fingers until you know how serious the problem is. Multnomah County alone has to process 300,000+ ballots. Assuming a .1% error rate, that means 300 mistakes each election. In a county with high mobility, lots of new residents, and thousands if not tens of thousands of new registrants, that error rate would be very low.

now you say, is this a problem of vote by mail? no, in fact the vote by mail system assures more accurate registration rolls than other systems, because the post office helps keep things up to date by returning undeliverable voter information (these materials are not forwarded).

There are disadvantages to vote by mail, but accuracy of the rolls (and in fact accuracy of the vote count) are not two of them. This is well documented, search google for "Voting Technology Project" and you'll see.

From today's Oregonian looks like either ballot is good, which is the way it should be. And so I guess what I heard before was simply a rumor. Nice to know. Too bad the elections people couldn't have explained that much over the phone or by email, but they're probably busy and underfunded and stuff... and all is cool with Erika & Erika.