Fake But Fake

There was quite a lot of buzz right after the election about an election official in Florida reporting that a very rare stamp may have been used on an absentee ballot. Before sealing the ballot in with others, the official was pretty sure he saw an "inverted Jenny" stamp. There are only about 100 of these printing mistakes known to exist, so this would have been a very big deal.

Except the stamp was fake.

The blue and red stamp, which took its name from an image of a biplane accidentally printed upside down, was spotted by a county commissioner in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, last month on an envelope that contained a ballot for the November 7 election.

The find caused a stir among stamp collectors. Only 100 of the misprinted stamps have ever been found, making them rare in the world of philately.

An Inverted Jenny stamp could be worth $300,000, experts have said. A block of four was traded recently for another rare stamp in a transaction valued at nearly $3 million.

Experts examined the stamp on Monday at the behest of the Broward County Elections office.

"To a trained philatelist, it's pretty obvious that it's a counterfeit," Randy Shoemaker of Professional Stamp Experts, a stamp grading service, told reporters at a news conference in Broward County.

Mercer Bristow, an expert with the American Philatelic Society who also examined the stamp, said both the printing method and the perforations on the edge of the stamp gave it away as a fake.

This one sounded fishy from the beginning, which is why I never posted about it. There are simply too few of these items that someone would screw up and use it. Through diligent work by one of our highly medicated operatives from the Magic 8-Ball photography and Trawling Service, Ltd., we were able to obtain this exclusive look at the inverted Jenny stamp that fooled the election worker.