Already we have heard about countless voting nightmares around the country – and the election isn’t for three days yet!. Absentee ballots are playing a major role in the problems of our democracy this year, and this is one that is really bad:

If you got your absentee ballot in the mail and it looks suspiciously like a photocopy of a regular ballot, that’s because, well, it is.

Unusually high demand and a printing order that wasn’t filled fast enough caused the San Diego County Registrar of Voters to run short of absentee ballots this week. About 5,000 photocopies were mailed out instead, said Registrar of Voters Mikel Haas.

But there’s nothing to fear, Haas said. “Their votes will be counted.” When those ballots are returned, registrar’s employees will copy voters’ choices by hand onto regular card stock ballots that can be run through the optical scanners that count the votes.

Photocopied ballots were mailed in the same envelopes as regular absentee ballots. As with all absentee votes, the envelopes must be signed by the voter and verified by the registrar’s office.

Although barely more than 1 percent of the 427,000 absentee voters will be affected, it has caused consternation in an election season that has seen a growing mistrust of new electronic voting machines.

“I just think it’s bizarre that they literally transfer people’s votes from one piece of paper to another,” said San Diego County Democratic Party Chairman Jess Durfee. “Any time you do that, there have got to be mistakes.”

So people in San Diego are supposed to trust someone to “transfer” their vote to a ballot? WTF? No sensible person trusts the system anymore and a move like this will really disenfranchise what little trust their might be.

A note to the government – you keep pushing the people like this and the people will push back. They get their chance to push back on Tuesday, but if the election process is screwed up again, then other means to push back might be sought. You are putting this nation on a collision course with disaster.