A major theme of The Voting Wars is that we learned the wrong lessons after the Florida 2000 debacle.

Here’s some good evidence at ground zero of the 2000 battles: Palm Beach County:

The problem started when an Arizona company that printed the ballots failed to include a heading over the merit retention elections for judges on the Florida Supreme Court and 4th District Court of Appeal. The mistake was discovered and corrected after the first 60,000 ballots were printed and 50,000 mailed.

It was soon discovered that the error would affect all races on the flawed ballot. When the header was inserted, the races on about half of the ballots shifted, Bucher said. The shift will make it impossible for tabulation machines to count the votes on an estimated 27,000 of the bad ballots. Saying it would be impossible to program machines to read the defective ballots, Bucher said the only alternative is to duplicate them by hand.

Late Friday, she sent Detzner a report, outlining how the process will unfold Monday when workers begin opening, sorting and copying the roughly 15,000 absentee ballots that have been returned. Of the total, she said about 8,600 are flawed.