Tampa family votes for Rays to be All Stars more than 30,000 times

TAMPA - Filling out 750 All-Star ballots at a Rays game is a little crazy. But that was just the start.

Diana, Fay and Jerry Lichtenwalter began this year’s bonanza when the ballots first came out. Then they took some home. Some, as in a few thousand. After they turned those in, they took home a few thousand more.

Two years ago, they filled out 13,000 ballots—voting all for the Rays—and last year, they doubled it to 26,000. This year, they streamlined the process, figured out how to do more at a time, and are now at 33,000.

What do they get out of it? Free Whitney Bank Club tickets to another Rays game each time they turn in the most during a home game. That’s a lot of punching, folding and stacking for a few hot dogs and pops. But they wouldn’t have it any other way.

We featured the Lichtenwalters last year, when Diana and Fay showed us how they punched out the chads and Jerry did little more than retrieve the little papers from his living room floor. Jerry still observes his wife and daughter well, but has yet to fill out a ballot of his own, as he emphatically points out.

With their new process, we had to see how this New Port Richey family found a way to go from 200 ballots an hour in 2010 to 600 an hour this year. There are probably a few Fortune 500 companies with assembly lines who will be calling upon their services very soon. If they’re looking for a supervisor, they can call Jerry.

Check out the video above to see their stacks of ballots, ready for one final haul to the Trop.