County Auditors all over the state are complaining about the extra work they're having to do to respond to the election contest. Pierce County is moaning about the cost: "
It's a major monkey wrench in the machinery of Pierce County," said the county's deputy prosecuting attorney, Dan Hamilton, who said he and another attorney had spent the past two weeks almost exclusively working on the case. "A lot of the county's business is not being done because of just trying to manage this."Oh, please. Documenting problems with the elections they run is the counties business. If Pierce and the other counties had done a cleaner job of managing the election in the first place, we wouldn't be going through this exercise.
One of the Auditors who has filed his own suit to dismiss the election contest on the grounds that it creates too much work for his office, is Snohomish County's Bob Terwilliger ("Sideshow" Bob Terwilliger?).
Terwilliger's office has not done a steller job of explaining its November election results. I've been requesting information about the reconciliation of ballots to voters. Two weeks ago Snohomish Elections replied with the information that:
1) 158 "Less voters [were] credited for voting at poll than tabulated"
and
2) 124 "Less Voters [were] credited for voting absentee than tabulated"
Less, fewer, whatever. The point is that Snohomish counted at least 282 mystery ballots that can't be tied to voters. I immediately posed some follow up questions. Were those 158 polling place votes from machine (Direct Record Electronic device, or DRE) votes? or from provisionals, which are handled and tabulated like absentee ballots? Did the number of absentee voters credited include "courtesy credits", which are for voters who return their ballots with late postmarks or other errors and get a "brownie point" credit for voting, even though their ballot isn't counted? Today I received this reponse:
1. Snohomish County does not track voter credit by DRE vs. provisional ballot voting. Therefore Snohomish County has no public records responsive to this question / request.In other words, (1) some number of unverified provisionals must have been counted, they just have no idea how many and (2) because the credit count includes "courtesy credits", the true number of mystery absentee ballots that were counted is higher than 124, they just have no idea how many.2. Snohomish County does not track ‘courtesy credits’, which are given to voters who’s ballots were postmarked by election day, but not received by the Elections Division until after certification. Therefore Snohomish County has no public records responsive to this question / request.
If you live in Snohomish County, you should be upset about Terwilliger's sloppiness and lack of responsibility. At least you have the recourse of voting him out of office at the next election (assuming he counts your votes properly). Here in King County, we have no elected auditor, our election officials are appointed by the County Executive. A very sensible proposal is now being floated to create an elected auditor post. Astonishingly, yesterday's Seattle Times editorial came out against having an independent auditor, on the theory that an elections office that reports to Ron Sims would be more professional and less corrupted by politics than an auditor who is directly accountable to the public. If the Times is looking for ways to cut its expenses, a good place to start would be to lay off whoever wrote that editorial.
Yes, King County needs an elected auditor. And Snohomish, Yakima and a few other counties need to elect different ones.
Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at January 31, 2005 10:09 AM | Email ThisEvery day billions of dollars and transactions are tallied accurately to the cent and anything less is simply not good enough.
It's only in elections and the minds of liberal extremists like those at Horsesass.org that slopiness of this magnitude is excused and accepted as normal.
I guess that's how we got the saying that "it's good enough for government work."
I imagine trying to find any semblance of order in Bob's "office" is somewhat akin to herding cats.
Yet the people, like the blind little sheep we are, keep voting him in! Amazing. Or do we??? Hmm...
Posted by: Scott on January 31, 2005 10:59 AMIt will be interesting to see how various County's stack up next to each other in the Vote Accountability error.
So "Sideshow" Bob Terwilliger says he doesn't know the number of "Late Votes"...courtesy credits if you will, for folks that sent in ballots too late to be counted but they were given credit???
I believe in Jefferson County they actually code these Late Votes in their Voter Credit Edit List. They Code all Voter Credits as either:
Y=Polls
A=Absentees
C=Provisionals
L=Late Votes
Is "Sideshow" telling us that he doesn't have a Voter Credit for Edit Database similiar to Jefferson County?????
Or is "Sideshow" telling us that he has it but just didn't use it as it was intended??
Let's all be very careful not to lump all County Auditors and Election Officials into the same douche-bag as KingCo and Snohomish.
Those "circle the wagons" e-mails Democrat Activist Auditor Corky Mattingly tried to orchestrate in support of Logan are even more telling as we analyze what each of these County's actually did in this election management process.
Stefan, you just might want to re-post the link to those County Auditor e-mails every once in awhile!
In the last election, thankfuly, things were moved to the library, where one was allowed to stand for extended periods in lines that seemingly went nowhere, or lead to the wrong poll workers, as 2 pricincts vote there.
Sloppy. Sloppy and undignified.
Posted by: Steve Ramsey on January 31, 2005 11:24 AMDare we think that they will do a cleaner, better job next time, if they don't want more of the same?
Posted by: Michele S on January 31, 2005 11:25 AMThat's not really true at all. At the polling place, DRE voters sign in in the polling book; provisional voters sign in as provisional voters in a seperate book. It's possibly the easiest thing in the world to track that. If they then lump them into one list, that's their choice, but it's a foolish one--and it seems like it would be criminal. Why doesn't state law require them to keep track of who voted provisionally?
But I'll bet you dollars to donuts that those extra votes are provisional ballots. In order to vote by DRE without getting recorded as a voter, you'd have to surreptitiously steal a newly recharged voters card out from under the nose of a poll watcher, then dash into the polling room and vote without anyone stopping you.
Posted by: Timothy on January 31, 2005 11:27 AMHave you obtained and read the written instructions followed by the counting center workers in Snohomish or King County yet?
If not, get them -- read the procedure for "wanding" the bar codes on the outer envelopes that bear the voters' signatures, then go to the procedure for verifying the signatures on the envelopes in each "batch." Watch for words like "AV ballot already received," and look at the next steps in the procedure to see whether they use the software to weed out the second, third or thirtieth absentee ballot received from any voter.
I wouldn't be surprised if you are surprised by what you find.
It's worth the effort: You may find the probable explanation for Snohomish's 124 extra absentee ballots.
Posted by: Micajah on January 31, 2005 06:28 PMCounty Auditor - Accounting experience a must. BS in Mathematics preferred (well, really if you can count and keep track of what you counted, you're the person we're looking for). Pay DOE, EOE. Direct inquiries to Bob Terwillinger, 3000 Rockefeller Ave M/S 505 Everett, WA 98201-4046 For more information visit http://www.co.snohomish.wa.us/auditor
Posted by: Lawrence Rafferty on February 2, 2005 03:37 PM