The King County elections office, the Democratic Party, Secretary of State Sam Reed, and the lazy and credulous wing of the local media establishment have been feeding us the pabulum that King County's discrepancy of thousands more ballots than voters is just the way every election is supposed to be managed.
Fortunately, there are others who will tell you the truth. County auditors are now starting to come forward and state that the huge discrepancy in King County is an anomaly and that there's no good explanation for it.
I had a long conversation this morning with Jefferson County Auditor Donna Eldridge. Ms. Eldridge is in the interesting position of being a three-term elected Republican in a largely Democratic county. Indeed, Jefferson gave Gregoire her second highest margin of any county in the state, after San Juan County, and a tad higher even than King County. But nobody is likely to suspect Ms. Eldridge's office of funny business, because she runs a professional operations and by all indications the number of ballots cast in Jefferson County reconciles with the number of voters who cast them.
Take a look at the number of ballots counted in Jefferson County in the first count: 18,772. In the machine recount? 18,772. In the manual recount? 18,772. King County, on the other hand, kept finding new pieces of paper every time they unzipped their pants. How did Jefferson County do it? At every step of the process, Eldridge explained, they reconciled the number of voters with the number of ballots and if there was a discrepancy (such as ballots getting caught in a tabulator) they figured out what happened, fixed the problem, noted the exceptioins and reconciled again.
In the final report they were down to 18,772 ballots counted and 18,760 voters identified. The difference of 12 was attributable to 3 unregistered military voters, 3 Address Confidentiality Program voters, and 6 provisionals that were wrongly dropped into ballot boxes. In the latter cases, there were also 6 empty provisional envelopes from matching precincts, so within the realm of reasonable doubt the 6 empty envelopes (all from eligible voters) could be tied with the 6 improperly commingled provisionals. That's all. At most 6, and probably 0, untraceable ballots. Even when you scale for total number of ballots counted, the equivalent number in King County would be at most 289, as opposed to the actual discrepancy of 2,150.
I asked Eldridge if huge discrepancies as we've seen in King County are typical. She said no, they are not. "This would never happen in our county" she said, adding that she was "blown away" when it first became apparent on Dec. 2 that King County had a big reconciliation problem, that was not yet being reported. She knows of no explanation. County auditors have discussed this issue amongst themselves. While some are inclined to circle the wagons and protect Dean Logan, a number of auditors are quietly uncomfortable with what's going on. Ms. Eldridge is the first (that I know of) to take a strong stand. She helped scuttle what would have been an Orwellian letter by the auditor association in support of Dean Logan.
Eldridge has promised to send me her county's reconciliation reports when she's back in the office after the holiday. This should give us a baseline for how an election should be managed and how the results should be tabulated and reconciled. We'll just have to keep pressing King County to either explain their entire discrepancy with attribution to specific factors, or explain why they can't do as good of a job as, say, Jefferson and other counties.
Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at January 17, 2005 01:37 PM | Email ThisSounds like she is the better qualified person.
Posted by: Bryan on January 17, 2005 01:47 PMIf I were Dean Logan and I wanted to appear credible, I'd be bending over backward to reconcile everything and throwing out anything that I could not reconcile.
My guess is that Logan is under HUGE pressure from Sims, Gregoire and others to deliver the result they want.
Scary. All honest voters don't deserve this kind of disenfranchisement. I took special care to look up the issues and candidates, go to the polls early, mark my ballot carefully, recheck it, and then make sure it was properly tabulated.
When I see what is going on in King County, even if we only look at the information that is absolute fact and agreed upon by everyone (the stuff even Goldstein can't spin away,) I have no faith in the elections officials and their superiors and I'd like to see them all removed from office.
Posted by: Jeff B. on January 17, 2005 01:59 PMAs far as I'm concerned, the reason there are more votes than voters in KingCo is because SOMEONE STUFFED THE BALLOTBOX!!!!! This is why the reconciliation must be done....so the public knows this did not happen. Unfortunately, in KingCo there may still be some precindts where there are LESS votes than voters too. As far as I'm concerned, this is because SOMEONE UNSTUFFED THE BALLOTBOX!!!!!!
Who is to say someone didn't destroy some Rossi ballots?????
Logan was sloppy...pure and simple. Rather than admit it, he allowed his fellow Auditors a chance to circle the wagons and say it was ok.
Thank God for Auditors like Donna Eldridge with the character and integrity to stand up and say this lack of reconciliation is UNACCEPTABLE in her County.
RCW 29A.84.720
Every person charged with the performance of any duty under the provisions of any law of this state relating to elections, including primaries, or the provisions of any charter or ordinance of any city or town of this state relating to elections who willfully neglects or refuses to perform such duty, or who, in the performance of such duty, or in his or her official capacity, knowingly or fraudulently violates any of the provisions of law relating to such duty, is guilty of a class C felony punishable under RCW 9A.20.021 and shall forfeit his or her office.Posted by: Boonie on January 17, 2005 02:08 PM
If done by precinct, I would expect a reasonably run operation to balance votors to ballots to between 0 and 1 per precinct and if those balance the vote difference between counts should be very low. I don't know by experience how close as a % normal election results but I bet it would be pretty easy to shown KC is far more sloppy than the rest of the state.
Posted by: J in Kitsap on January 17, 2005 02:25 PM345 Ballots accounted for.
ALL BALLOTS ISSUED TO A PRECINDT MUST BE ACCOUNTED FOR. This Ballot Accountability is signed by 2 Poll workers.
ANY IRREGULARITIES SHOULD BE INVESTIGATED AND DISCLOSED BEFORE CERTIFYING!!!!!
There is also a ballot transmittal form that Poll workers fill out and sign. This form stays with the ballots in the ballotbox. It accounts for the 227 Regular Votes
The 11 provisional votes
The # of Challenged ballots
The # of Absentees ballots returned at that precindt SEALED IN THE IRREGULAR BALLOT ENVELOPE.
There are reasonable procedures in place. The problem is many County's did not follow them thoroughly.
If all these underlying data reports are correct and reconciled, KingCo should be like Jefferson County. And if there is a problem, KingCo should have been aware of it upfront and clearly disclosed it.....not try to simply minimize it.
Clearly, Logan & Huennekens have tried to minimize errors they should have caught and should still be able to explain. But they can't. Why? Because ballots are now comingled and a morass has been created to try and confuse us and mask their incompetence.
Interestingly, those rules say that the reconciliation shall be done before certifying the county's election results.
I wonder: Who has carefully examined those precinct-by-precinct reconciliation records that King County should have in its possession?
Posted by: Micajah on January 17, 2005 03:12 PMIt may turn out that the number of voterless ballots shrinks considerably when reconciled in this manner -- or we may find out that the problem is worse than anyone imagined. The only way to know for sure is to examine the precinct records.
Posted by: scottd on January 17, 2005 03:58 PMI think the problem King Co. has is when they add up all the poll book reconciliations PLUS Absentees and then take into consideration other issues like the Voter Confidentiality Program participants and provisionals etc....they still have 1800+ NET more votes than voters.
Not good.
I really don't know what would be the impact of the King County records of their reconciliation efforts, since I don't know what they did or didn't do, or what they recorded or didn't record.
All I can say is those records ought to be looked over very carefully, since discrepancies between the number of ballots cast and counted and the number of voters identified as casting those ballots ought to show up on a precinct-by-precinct basis.
Getting down to the precinct level may allow people to focus on figuring out what happened in any suspicious precincts. (Which, of course, was what King County was required to do before certifying their initial election return in November -- but if they did as required, what explanation of any discrepancies did they put on the record?)
Once those records are carefully examined, we might at least know whether we have a classic case of stuffing the ballot boxes after the polls closed, or a combination of that plus many people acting individually in placing ballots in the boxes without leaving a record of their having cast those ballots.
If those precinct records don't prove the non-existence of "mystery" ballots or show that the "mystery" ballots came from individuals acting at the polling places, there seems to be no logical explanation other than that they were inserted into the hundreds of thousands of ballots to be counted at some time after the polls closed.
Posted by: Micajah on January 17, 2005 04:25 PMIt could be that KingCo carried out the required precinct certifications at the time of the first vote count and didn't feel the need to respond to questions from bloggers misinterpreting the publicly released voter lists. If that's true, then they have created a public relations disaster by not correcting rumors in a timely manner -- and Logan should be held accountable for that because he has a responsibility for preserving public confidence in the voting process.
On the other hand, it could be that they have not been forthcoming because their reconciliation is a mess -- in which case, Logan is in deeper trouble. I suspect this will come out in testimony during the court challenge.
By the way, I agree that if the detailed record shows things are as bad as many of the posters here think, it would have a big impact on the court's ruling. I'm just withholding judgment until more facts are out in the open.
Posted by: scottd on January 17, 2005 04:50 PMI just read the First Request For Production for King County. The auditing records are a key part of the request.
The close we get to an actual trial, we will begin to see more and more election officials speak up about all the problems that are in KC. It is only easy to speak in vague generalities when you know that the facts are not known. Once it is obvious that the facts will be brought out the vague generalities will disappear.
The attitude of Logan & Huennekens post-election night toward lack of reconciliation and explaining discrepancies & irregularities clearly must have negatively impact their entire staff and the poll workers. Close is good enough means lower standard...lower standard=PROBLEMS!!
Re your 2:07 PM post on UNSTUFFING ballot boxes. That's my theory as well. Having failed to "find" and/or create enough fraudulent votes to steal the election in the initial vote tabulation and the enhanced ballots in the first machine recount, the vote counters at KC were likely driven to eliminate some Rossi votes in order to bring about their initial "winning margin" of eight or ten votes in the manual recount. Time will tell. It's great to get some insight into the checks that are supposed to be operating at the precinct level. Helps the confirm the degree of coverup needed to continue the charade of this, the finest of all elections!
Posted by: RLG on January 17, 2005 06:24 PMPosted by Micajah at January 17, 2005 04:25 PM
You have stolen my thunder! Great job! As a former Precinct Inspector, you can hardly go wrong with Precinct accounting...such as it is...
Just six? Why, that's not even worth talking about. Except that if I have my math right, that makes their provisional error rate about .03%. King's 348 against 876,000 ballots yields an error rate of...
.03%.
Sort of takes the starch out of that argument.
Posted by: torridjoe on January 18, 2005 11:43 AMSorry to interrupt your delirium. You can crawl back into the swamp now.
Posted by: Stefan Sharkansky on January 18, 2005 11:50 AMAm I done? I like it here, but you sure do seem to have a handle on things....I was thinking Goody2shoes for my next handle...but I like the swamp, one meets the most interesting creatures here!
Posted by: smegma on January 18, 2005 07:22 PM