I'll be posting more revelations later from the Absentee Ballot "Audit Trail" that King County released on Friday. On interesting find is confirmation that King County counted its provisional ballots too early in the canvassing process, in violation of state election rules.
WAC 434-240-250 ( "Absentee voter attempting to vote at the polls") states very clearly that provisional ballots are not to be processed until after all absentee ballots have been processed, in order to prevent double voting. Other information I discovered a few weeks ago indicated that King County counted provisionals concurrent with the absentees, in violation of this rule.
The information in the audit trail confirms that to be the case. 93 voters who submitted absentee ballots are credited with voting provisional. It's impossible to tell whether these voters got to have both their absentee and their provisional ballots tabulated. But given that these ballots were processed in violation of state rules, the burden should be on King County to show that no double-counting occurred.
Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at April 18, 2005 10:34 AM | Email ThisFred: If all this is just propaganda by nutty churchgoers, then why bother even coming here? If I were you and believed that, I sure wouldn't waste my time here. I'd be somewhere else. Since you're not, I'd say you come here because you find stuff that Stefan posts credible. Maybe it even scares you. But it makes no sense whatsoever to hang out in a place you consider to have zero credibility.
Posted by: Michele on April 18, 2005 11:31 AMI suspect Fred was joking.
Posted by: Wayne on April 18, 2005 11:32 AMHave you come across anything in their records which indicates that they rejected even one absentee ballot because the voter had already been credited with voting?
I don't recall seeing anything yet. The worksheet they put together when they began to try to match those 348 PBAVs with reg'd voters noted that a few dozen had already been credited with voting a ballot other than the PBAV. But, that was an after-the-fact recognition. I'm wondering if they have any record of rejecting any ballot to prevent a voter from voting more than once.
Posted by: Micajah on April 18, 2005 11:42 AM...thought I'd beat Nelson to the punch :-)
Posted by: Tucker on April 18, 2005 12:41 PMGo Dino!
Posted by: Michele on April 18, 2005 12:56 PM2004 was a *record* year for Provisional voting. (This was very suspicious in itself!)
Now - one has to wonder if the sudden increase in provisional voting - ALONG with the erratic way of counting these ballots - PLUS the ballots that were accidently (cough) ran through the accutvote machines....- ALONG with the failure to check duplicate voting by absentee....were perhaps a combined and intentional act of fraud?
What else could it be?? No one County could possibly make so many errors that allowed the manipulation of ballots and destroyed the integrity of our election security measures! It had to be an intentional effort!
My God!
Posted by: Deborah on April 18, 2005 02:46 PMThe problem is not nearly as bad as what you seem to indicate. But no doubt it existed.
WAC 434-240-250 does not apply to all provisional ballots. It only applies to provisional ballots cast by people who were issued absentee ballots, and show up at the polls because they claim to have misplaced their absentee ballot, etc. These provisional ballots shouldn't be processed and tabulated until all absentee ballots have been processed, so that these voters don't vote twice.
The vast majority of the 31,000 or so provisional voters didn't fall in this category. The biggest group is people who registered in the last week or two before the October 2, 2004 deadline, and didn't have their names entered into the poll books yet due to slow processing of new registrations. Another large group of people are those who voted at a different polling place for some reason.
Neither WAC 434-240-250, nor common sense, would require waiting until all absentee ballots are processed, prior to processing these other kinds of provisional ballots.
That being said, I am sure that King County probably did process a lot of these provisional ballots of absentee voters prematurely. (The PBAV voters would not be included in this category, since they improperly stuffed their provisional ballots directly -- prevented any further effective processing.)
Posted by: Richard Pope on April 18, 2005 08:27 PMLook at the explanatory memo that they gave you when you picked up the absentee audit trail info.
They apparently set up their procedure backwards.
The memo has a "challenge code" for absentee ballots which says:
"FAILS Voter cast a provisional ballot."
That means their standard procedure is to reject the absentee ballot when a voter casts a provisional ballot.
The law says: "The special ballot shall be securely retained until all absentee ballots have been received and credited. If the voter did not return his absentee ballot, the special ballot shall be processed as a valid ballot. If the voter has returned an absentee ballot, the ballot shall not be counted and should then be referred to the canvassing board for their disposition."
They apparently read the last sentence to mean that the absentee ballot "shall not be counted."
It seems clear to me from the context that the provisional ballot is supposed to be kept aside and rejected if the absentee ballot is returned.
Otherwise, it would make no sense to say that the "special ballot shall be securely retained until all absentee ballots have been received and credited." If the voter returns a valid absentee ballot, then it is counted and the voter is credited with voting. The special/provisional ballot is then rejected.
If King County really did it all backwards, then those voters credited with casting provisional ballots and who were also on the list of voters whose absentee ballots were returned may have been allowed to cast only one ballot -- but in King County's backwards misunderstanding of the law, it was the provisional ballot that was accepted.
Are there any "FAILS" codes in the stuff they gave you? Maybe some of them would match the ~91 voters who returned absentee ballots but were credited with voting provisional ballots.
If there are ~91 names of people whose absentee ballots were returned and who were credited with voting by provisional ballot, where is the report that referred their rejected absentee ballots to the canvassing board?
Can you associate the ballots of any of those 91 voters whose absentee ballots were returned, but who were credited with voting a provisional ballot, with a batch number?
If you knew the batch number that any of their returned absentee ballots were in, you could probably find the date the batch was received, verified, and tabulated.
If the date tabulated was a few days prior to Nov. 10, when the provisional ballots began to be tabulated, it seems probable that the absentees were tabulated before anyone knew the voters had also cast provisional ballots.
Unfortunately, the batch slips would only show the number rejected in the entire batch, so it wouldn't be likely that you could figure out whether the absentee ballot of any of the 91 was rejected because of a provisional ballot cast by the same voter. But, it might be worth a look at those batch slips. (It would take a lot of luck, but the numbers on the batch slips might match up with the voter database showing which ones in the batch were credited with voting absentee. It may be possible by a process of elimination to show that some of the 91 were first credited with voting by absentee ballot -- then their provisional ballots were also tabulated.)
If it could be shown that even one of them had both ballots accepted and tabulated, it would make for an interesting question: How did the voting history come to reflect only the provisional ballot as the one the voter was credited with casting?
Posted by: Micajah on April 19, 2005 09:15 PMIn what batches were the absentee ballots of the 91 voters who were credited with casting provisional ballots?
Posted by: Micajah on April 21, 2005 10:00 AM