An absentee ballot in Florida was received with one of the rarest stamps of all time on it. The state of Florida is now a lot richer thanks to some presumably old forgetful person who mailed in their vote using totally rare stamps from the early 1900s. One of the stamps was a 1918 Inverted Jenny stamp, which was a mistaken printing of a plane upside down. This stamp is so famous that even I had heard of it before.
The person who mailed the letter using the ultra-rare stamp didn’t write their name on the ballot or on the envelope, so Florida is going to auction off the stamps to make some money for more Diebold voting machines. Katherine Harris will never lose another election again:
The 1918 Inverted Jenny stamp, which takes its name from an image of a biplane accidentally printed upside-down, turned up on Tuesday night in Fort Lauderdale, where election officials were inspecting ballots from parts of south Florida, Broward County Commissioner John Rodstrom told Reuters.
Only 100 of the stamps have ever been found, making them one of the top prizes of all philately.
Rodstrom, a member of the county’s Canvassing Board, said he spotted the red and blue Inverted Jenny on a large envelope with two stamps from the 1930s and another dating to World War Two.
The nominal value of the four vintage U.S. Post Office stamps was 87 cents, he said.
“I thought, ‘Oh my God, I know that stamp, I’ve seen that stamp before,”‘ said Rodstrom, 54, who dabbled in stamp collecting as a boy. “I’d forgotten the name. I just remembered there was a stamp with an upside-down biplane on it and that it was a very rare, rare stamp.”
Rodstrom said he did not examine the envelope’s postmark, but it had no return address and the ballot was disqualified because it gave no clue as to the identity of the voter.
Election officials have been too busy certifying the outcome of Tuesday’s race to have the stamp authenticated, Rodstrom said.
A block of four of the stamps sold for almost $3 million last year, however, and Rodstrom said the one that turned up Tuesday night could fetch about $500,000 for Broward County at auction.
“It’s now government property,” he said.
The article states that the postmark should not hurt the value of the stamp, and that the unique story of how it was found might make it fetch more at auction.
It’s possible that the person realized that the stamp was incredibly valuable and wanted to donate it in a clever way to the state of Florida. It seems like they gave election officials way too much credit, though. Teresa Lepore would have thrown it in the trash without blinking, especially if they voted Democrat.
Ah! Isn’t that so neat? I read the story in the AP and I was like, “Wow, I hope they didn’t postmark all over it.” I wonder who did that and I don’t think it was accidental since it looked like a mini stamp collection on the outside.
to think that the stamps could have been sold and the money could have gone to a true charity like all of the homeless and hungry people in Ft. Lauderdale, what a shame.
LOL re Katherine Harris never losing election again. So true re Diebold–who would want a voting machine that can be easily tampered with and has no record of cast votes, no paper trail, nothing to verify what really happened. Interestingly, Karl Rove was assuring Bush as late as 8 p.m. on the election day that Republicans have both the House and the Senate.. makes you wonder if this time the vote rigging wasn’t enough. Remember exit polls in 2004 telling one story and results being different–when we learned that exit polls are “unreliable” (while they’re used everywhere in the world to monitor elections)? When pressed for an answer, Jimmy Carter who travels the world overseeing elections said that the U.S. doesn’t meet ANY standards used in emerging democracies.