I'm surprised there aren't more slip-ups.
I was trying to figure out how many different ballots there are in my county, Santa Clara, for the upcoming June election. The Republicans, Greens, and Peace and Freedom parties have closed presidential primaries: that 3 different ballots right there. The Democrats have opened the presidential contest to NPP voters BUT they're also having an election for party officials, so they have one ballot for registered Democrats and another for No Party voters who request it (the ones I and my husband, both mail voters, received were different). The American Independent Party and Libertarian Party are also having presidential primaries open to NPP voters: I don't know if they have any party issues up for a vote, but let's assume not for the sake of argument. So that's 7 different ballots that have to be produced just for the presidential primaries.
That's not the only thing on the California ballot in June. There's an open primary for US Senate, a state proposition, and two county propositions. Those are the same for everyone. Now the fun starts. There's also a primary for the US House of Representatives - but there are 4 Congressional districts in my county. Now we're up to 4*7 = 28 different ballots the county registrar has to produce. There's a primary for state Senator (there are 4 state senate districts in the county) and state assembly (6 districts), and this is where I have to get out the maps and colored markers to see how much overlap there is and we haven't even gotten to the race for county supervisor or any city-specific offices or propositions. And all of this has to be produced in multiple languages (the ballots most people get include both English and Spanish, but voters may also request ballots and information in Chinese, Tagalog, Vietnamese and other languages).
But wait - there's more: since Congressional, state senate, and assembly districts can and do cross county lines, so the registrar has to coordinate with those in adjacent counties to make sure that when they all go to count the votes those candidates get the right numbers.
Oh, and the candidates' names are listed in a randomized order that varies by assembly district. I'm impressed by how few errors there actually are (I did encounter one, once, in 40 years of voting here.)
So, yeah, I'd attribute any ballot problems to human error rather than Grand Conspiracy. And I don't think this lawsuit is going to go anywhere.
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