ARRANGEMENT OF BALLOT IRKS LIBERTARIAN CANDIDATE

Independent state Assembly candidate William Bombard says his placement on
the ballot could be an occupational hazard and has already cost him one vote.

Bombard's name appears on the same line as the Marijuana Part Reform
candidates for governor, and he has already received a call from a voter
who assumed he, too, was a member of the Marijuana Reform party.

"She said to me that she was upset because I was a Marijuana Reform Party
candidate. I said, 'No I wasn't,'" said Bombard, who is running on the
Libertarian Party line. "I didn't know anything about it, because I never
looked at the ballot."

He marched directly to the Warren County Board of Elections to see for
himself, where he found he did share the same line with the Marijuana
Reform Party, whose gubernatorial candidate has the first row on the left.

Warren County Election Commissioner Mary Beth Casey said the confusion is
the result of a crowded ballot.

"There's not anything we can do about it, because the machine can only
accommodate nine parties down," Casey explained. "Then what they have to do
is start wrapping back up and around. And they always start from the bottom
and work their way up when they have to do the wrapping."

She explained that all of the Libertarian Party candidates had to go across
the full face of the ballot on the same line.

Casey said the ballots wrap up from the bottom because it's less confusing
for voters. In the last presidential election, several parties shared the
bottom four lines.

"They're very particular in how they do that ballot," she said. "There's a
lot to it. People don't even realize what goes into creating the face of a
ballot. It just happens that was how that particular one came out."

But Bombard wasn't satisfied with the answer from the Board of Elections.
"To an old person, all they see is the Marijuana Reform Party and then they
go all the way across," he explained. "They don't see the Libertarian
stuff, you don't see the Statue of Liberty logo."

Bombard, a counselor who works with recovering alcoholics and drug addicts,
said his job could be at risk if people think he is a member of a party
that promotes ending criminal prohibition of marijuana. He also thinks he
will lose votes from people who won't look down the line for his name. "I
already lost a vote because of it. And I'm not saying I would lose the
election because of it, but I did lose a vote, and I've got someone that's
mad at me," Bombard said.