With the fatigue of the budget saga slowly starting to fade (especially for those of us who took a few days off, which explains for the missing podcast last week), the annual process of bill signings and vetoes is also about to draw to a close.

Governor Schwarzenegger has a little more than 24 hours left to weigh in on bills sent to his desk by the Legislature. The weekend saw a flurry of signings and vetoes, too many to really keep track. In fact, one of the less talked about truths of this week is whether anyone truly can watch all of these bills. Certainly the shrinking Capitol press corps struggles more and more every year to do so.

Nonetheless, the intriguing side story to all of this is all of the vetoes that are being blamed on the budget impasse.

"Given the [budget] delay, I am only signing bills that are the highest priority for California," says Schwarzenegger in the boilerplate veto being attached to dozens and dozens of proposals.

Of course, determining "priority" is a subjective exercise and the supporters of some of these bills have questioned the governor's own standard. One poignant questioning of the standard came this morning from California's top elections official, Secretary of State Debra Bowen.

Bowen was critical of the governor's blanket veto of several elections-related proposals, including new ways for vote-by-mail to learn if their ballots have been rejected, and why; a bill making it easier for voters to change their mind after signing an initiative petition; and two measures helping indepedent voters understand their rights in choosing party ballots in primary elections.

"I'm dismayed the governor doesn’t believe it is a high priority to let voters know about their polling-place rights or if their votes were counted," said Bowen in a written statement. "I understand the governor is not fond of the Legislature these days, but it's California voters who are being punished."

Hang around the folks who conduct elections long enough and you'll start to see that some voting snafus are hard to prevent.

That's not to say that elections officials are perfect, nor is it to imply that there aren't other serious issues facing voting systems and accuracy. There are. But a quick glance at the county-by-county documents being released by Secretary of State Debra Bowen shows that... in many cases... it's all about voter error.

Bowen is posting the reports filed by county elections officials as part of California's long-standing law requiring a manual recount of a percentage of the ballots cast. Those totals are then matched to the totals tabluated by machines on election day.

When you browse through the reports for the February 5 primary election, you find only slight problems.

Take the 210 votes counted on election day in a precinct in San Bernardino County's Yucca Valley. Turns out, thanks to the manual recount, that there were actually 211 votes cast. The missing vote was cast for GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney, and local elections officials describe the problem as a "light pencil mark"-- one not dark enough to be read by the machines. Democrat Hillary Clinton lost a vote for the same reason in Sonoma County.

In another San Berdoo precinct, the machine counted an extra vote for Proposition 93 (term limits) because of a "stray mark" the voter made on the ballot. Sonoma had a few votes miscounted because the citizen marked two choices, but didn't erase one of them well enough. Similar and rare reports were filed from Kern and Marin counties. And in some pf the counties that have filed their manual recount reports so far, no errors were found.

There's obviously no major news here. It just seems worth noting than in the midst all of the furor over the integrity of voting, there may be no system to safeguard against the most primal of errors: those made by voters themselves.