For those of us that used the mail-in-ballots is there a way for a person to find out if their vote was counted or voided?

Sure there is, according to Napa County Registrar of Voters John Tuteur. There are a couple of ways to ensure a vote was counted and not disqualified.

The first is to call the elections office at 253-4321 once the election has been certified — the Feb. 5 election was certified just recently.

A vote-by-mail ballot could be disqualified if the ballot arrived after the deadline or if the envelope doesn’t have the voter’s signature on it. Elections workers will call the voter to come in and sign, if the signature line is blank. They also look at the signature that’s on the envelop and check it against the one on file, Tuteur said. Most of the time, it’s a spouse’s signature, but in five cases this month, they couldn’t resolve the discrepancy.

“We hope to improve the uncounted ballot statistics with better directions to voters for June and November and also because the 12,000 voters converted to vote by mail for the first time in February will be more used to the process in June and November,” Tuteur said.

Voters who cast provisional ballots can also call the elections office to see if their vote was counted.

A provisional ballot is for a voter who is not at the roster at the polling place or who is listed on the roster as inactive. The voter still gets to vote, but the elections office holds the ballot while it works to make sure the person should be active and is registered correctly. If so, the vote is counted. In Napa, for the Feb. 5 election, 62 percent of these provisional ballots panned out and were counted.

Beginning March 1, voters can check the county Web site — www.co.napa.ca.us — for the status of their ballot, Tuteur said.

Tuteur also invites voters to contact him directly at 253-4459 or jtuteur@co.napa.ca.us.

I’ve always wondered, does Napa cabbage or Nappa cabbage have any connection to our city or county?

None. That’s what Chef Ken Woytisek, an instructor at the Culinary Institute of America at Greystone in St. Helena told me. Woytisek said the name is a Japanese word with Chinese roots. Nappa describes leafy green vegetables. In Japanese, the original word was probably na ha, Woytisek said. Na means vegetable. Ha means leaf.

The leafy vegetable itself has an elongated head and can grow to as much as 3-4 lbs. The leaves are white with pale green tips, Woytisek said.

Nappa cabbage is often used in stir fries, Chinese dishes and in one of the many varieties of Kim Chee, the spicy fermented national dish of Korea. It isn’t, ironically, used much in Japanese dishes. And though it’s grown locally, its roots in Napa Valley are only agricultural, not etymological.

What is Glad You Asked?

Glad You Asked attempts to answer readers’ questions. So if your head is filled with a leafy problem that you’ve been chewing on and can’t quite crunch the data for, send it to jdeck er@napanews.com or 256-2215. I’ll get to the root of it.