'Whitey' Error to be Corrected by Chicago Election Board

By Soyoung Kwak in Miscellaneous on Oct 16, 2010 4:30PM

Folks at the Chicago Election Board will be pulling overtime this weekend as they try and correct the listing of Green Party gubernatorial candidate Rich Whitney's name as "R. Whitey" on thousands of electronic voting machines in Chicago. Almost 5,000 early votes have already been cast, and the serious typo will continue to appear on the voting machines throughout the weekend for the rest of the early voters. As a follow-up to the incident, a notice pointing out the mistake will accompany the city's early voting locations in efforts to clear up any confusion about who exactly is running as the Green Party candidate.

Also as a result of the mistake, Chicago elections crew will have to double-check and re-program the machines that will be used in the November 2 elections. But one of the bigger questions is, has this typo made Rich Whitney the laughing stock of the gubernatorial race? Maybe:

The board became aware of the typo Wednesday and called Whitney's lawyer Thursday morning. But Green Party Chairman Phil Huckelberry said a party member found the mistake Tuesday and was brushed off by city election officials for a day. "We don't have any idea what affect that has had on voters," Huckelberry said. "I think something needs to be done above and beyond what they're doing." Not only has the mistake made Chicago a laughingstock, he said, but "our candidate ... has been tagged with a name that really isn't that nice."

The ballot mistake will cost some 'tens of thousands' of dollars to fix. This mistake isn't seen as something that was deliberately done by the private vendor (as the Chicago Board of Elections insists), but we have to wonder if they ever thought of proofreading before sending these machines out into the political jungle.