By Chantal Lamers
Absentee ballots for Measure D, the $40 million Saratoga school bond issue, were delivered nearly two weeks late after being "lost" by the Saratoga Post Office.
Campaigners for Measure D took more than 1,600 absentee ballots to the Saratoga Post Office on April 22, but the ballots didn't begin arriving at residents' homes until May 5.
On June 3, Saratoga residents will vote on the $40 million bond issue for Saratoga schools.
Cindy Ruby, board of trustees president for Saratoga Union School District, said that Citizens for Saratoga Schools, which is campaigning for the bond measure, has not experienced problems with the post office in the past. "This isn't typical, but it is unfortunate," she said.
Area Coordinator Marcy Burns said the committee was ready to shell out more than $700 to mail the ballots out a second time when news came that the original ballots were being delivered.
Ruby said the whole ordeal has put CFSS behind schedule. She said the organization is considering filing a claim against the post office to pay for the expense of reprinting the ballots.
However, according to Bil Paul, corporate relations spokesperson for the U.S. Postal Service, with the exception of express mail, the post office doesn't guarantee mail delivery within a certain number of days. So in this case, filing a claim wouldn't be an option.
"In our opinion, the mail delivery was early enough to be effective for that election," Paul said.
Still, Ruby says no one has been able to explain what happened to the ballots once they were delivered to the post office.
After contacting numerous people in the postal service and state Congressman Tom Campbell's office, volunteers believed they had no other choice than to begin redoing all of the ballots, preparing them to be sent out a second time.
Then, on May 5, before stamps were placed on the new ballots, the post office was contacted once in the morning and again in the afternoon. Still the ballots had not been found. Later that day, volunteers discovered the ballots in their mailboxes.
Paul speculates that the mail was sent to San Jose, which normally processes all of Saratoga's mail, but he has no definite explanation for the temporary disappearance of the ballots.
[ Back to Contents Page | Saratoga News Home Page | Archives ]
This article appeared in the Saratoga News, May 14, 1997.
©1997 Metro Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.