Rarest of Stamps Mailed on Absentee Ballot

Some idiot either pulled off a huge hoax, or he really put one of the rarest stamps ever made on a manila envelope containing an absentee ballot and mailed it to Broward County Election Board. Because the idiot voter refused to identify himself, the vote didn’t count. And now the stamp will go up for auction with all proceeds going to the local government, and the stamp is expected to fetch a half-million dollars.

From Reuters here:

MIAMI (Reuters) – A Florida voter may have unwittingly lost hundreds of thousands of dollars by using an extremely rare stamp to mail an absentee ballot in Tuesday’s congressional election, a government official said on Friday.

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.

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.