Snohomish County Auditor "Sideshow" Bob Terwilliger is on the stand.
Terwilliger also counted several hundred more ballots than voters, was unfamiliar with Secretary of State administrative rules for proper election conduct and drafted the idiotic letter from county auditors praising Dean Logan
Hamilton is wasting the courts time on an irrelevant situation where there incorrectly appeared to be more ballots than registered voters, because the poll books were printed before the voter registration list was finalized. Snooze.
Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at May 31, 2005 02:54 PM | Email ThisIt don't get any better than this!
Handy is clearly part of a close-knit group that decided to circle the wagons to "protect the integrity of the Election community". How noble!!
And to do so, they lowered the bar of expectations to lower than whale sh*t!!!
It's ALWAYS the cover-up that exposes the incompetence and intent. These guys are stupid.
How happy is Durkan today???
Perhaps her life partner will provide comfort this evening.
His name?
"Sideshow" Bob Terwilliger. Life imitates art :)
Posted by: steve_dog on May 31, 2005 03:29 PMHe's getting visibly ticked about Korrel's cross.
Posted by: Andy on May 31, 2005 03:38 PMHow could the law be worded to get the point across to people like him?
The certificate of election is issued in reliance on the canvassing board's certification that the vote totals are a true representation of the votes cast.
Do we need to put "legal" in front of "votes cast"?
Are people like Logan and Terwilliger unable to understand that a "verification" of the abstract is a determination that it is true -- and that it cannot be true if it includes votes on untold numbers of illegal ballots, rejected ballots, and legal ballots that were sent through the vote tabulation more than once?
WAC 434-262-070 Official county canvass report. Upon completion of the verification of the auditor's abstract of votes and the documentation of any corrective action taken, the county canvassing board shall sign a certification that the abstract is a full, true, and correct representation of the votes cast for the issues and offices listed thereon.
Goldy actually said the Dems are calling Logan as a witness because "they have already won the contest"???? What in the heck?? Carlson said that would be like a salesman keeping on talking AFTER making the sale. STUPID!
Stefan--
Goldy is truly a clown. Maybe Goldy and Sideshow Bob can team up to entertain the troops. Geeez..
the Seattle Rabbi's must be relieved Stefan is on the show with Goldy....otherwise a lot of people might be under the misconception that all Jewish people are as dimwitted as Goldy!!
Your charactarization is false: he testified their reconciliation/accounting of absentee ballots was incorrect, which mirrors your latest KC "crime" dejour (WAC 434-262-070). He/Snohomish county believed there was a match between absentee ballots mailed/recieved/counted... until they found 224 that weren't during 2nd recount!!!
Imagine that... +-20 Rossi gain in absentee ballots discovered under exact same circumstances as those in KC.
Posted by: JDM on May 31, 2005 04:10 PMHe meant, "its harder to fudge things in the small counties where the mistakes are more visible"
Posted by: Righton on May 31, 2005 04:17 PMWelcome back. Did you have a nice trip to the other side of the globe? ;-)
Crediting voters at the polls by a notation in the poll book and in the voter registration and elections management computer system when their absentee or provisional ballots are accepted makes it possible to tell who has already voted -- and thus doesn't get the chance to vote more than once.
It also makes it possible to tell how many ballots should be in the vote count -- which is why the false Mail Ballot Report and Provisional Ballot Summary Report in King County are important. To know if you have counted only legal votes, counted all of them, and counted them only once, you absolutely have to know how many should have been counted by the vote tabulation system. You find out how many legal votes should be in the vote tabulation by checking to see how many voters were credited with voting. For absentee and provisional ballots, you double check by seeing whether the number of ballots on which votes were counted plus the number of rejected ballots equals the number of ballots received. You cannot do that reconciliation without knowing how many you received -- and King County still doesn't know how many they received, and they still have a gap of 875 more ballots in the vote count than voters credited with casting absentee ballots.
As you say, "It seems to me you either voted or you didn't, and only those who voted should be credited with voting." And, that is how it works. Voters are credited with voting to show that they voted.
The need to protect the secrecy of the ballot means that those at the polls are credited with "participating." No one knows whether they marked even one vote on the ballot.
For absentee ballots, the ballot is verified before it is seen, and so the voter is credited with voting -- but it may turn out that once the ballot itself is examined it turns out not to be valid. If the envelope is actually empty, or contains no valid ballot, there's no way at that point to go back and tie it to a particular voter and remove that voter's credit for voting. So it is possible to be credited with voting even though you have no ballot in the vote count -- but there is no way around that unless you want to eliminate secret ballots.
I don't know if there is a method which will make everybody happy, but it should be possible to device a system based on encrypted serial numbers to allow a machine to uncredit, while at the same time making it impossible for an election worker (or anyone else) to determine the identity of a voter from the ballot. This would involve systems that would have to be validated prior to use in an election, because once they are used, it would be impossible to challange any of the results.
As I say, there would be objections, because we, in effect, would have to trust a machine, but it actually would be possible to do what you describe.
Posted by: Dogbert on May 31, 2005 04:41 PMDogbert, Micajah: One requirement of a secret ballot system is that unless the votes in a precinct are nearly unanimous, there must be no way by which anyone could possibly discover how a person voted, nor any way for any person to prove how he voted. The latter requirement is necessary to protect voters from bribery or blackmail [some GOTV people might pay you $100 to vote for Kerry, but they should have no way of knowing you actually did so]. Any system which would allow a person's vote to be withdrawn would fail this criterion.
BTW, I make the exception for near-unanimous votes because if all but 'n' people in a precinct vote for candidate X, a group of 'n' people who all voted for candidate Y in a precinct would know that everyone else voted for candidate X. Further, if everyone in a precinct votes for candidate X, everyone in the world can tell the vote of everyone in the precinct.
Posted by: supercat on May 31, 2005 05:17 PMIn a perfect world, having the capability you describe would be a good enhancement of the system.
In the real world, I afraid that such a capability would simply provide one more opportunity for fraud and abuse.
If KC Elections (or any other, for that matter) were doing things correctly, such errant credits would be noted and counted, and could then be subtracted during reconciliation.
Posted by: ewaggin on May 31, 2005 06:08 PMYou said,
‘If the envelope is actually empty, or contains no valid ballot, there's no way at that point to go back and tie it to a particular voter and remove that voter's credit for voting. So it is possible to be credited with voting even though you have no ballot in the vote count -- but there is no way around that unless you want to eliminate secret ballots.’
This is incorrect. Envelopes have the signature verified prior to being opened. This means they are physically handled prior to being opened. I live in Kitsap County which has holes in both the outer envelope and the inner envelope. These holes should line up so one can see if there is a ballot inside. I say ‘should’ because the holes are off center and if the inner envelope is inserted backwards the holes cannot line up (this is stupid). Nevertheless, try holding an absentee ballot envelope (both outer and the security envelope) with a ballot inside and another without. The feel is very different. Not a little, not slightly, but very different. These can be removed during the signature validation. Removal of crediting should occur here.
1. forget the first post, I was just thinking out loud.
2. Read carefully the second post. This is counterintuitive, but mathematically rigorous. It is possible to create a fairly simple method by which you can be sure that there is a ballot cast for every envelope recieved without compromising voter secrecy. This is basically the same technology which allows secure (HTTPS) bank transactions over the internet. The key is that you can match an envelope to a ballot without being able to match a ballot to an envelope.
And yes, I agree that not creating the screw-ups in the first place is first choice, but the issue here is how do you have a paper trail after they (predictably) have already hosed it.
Posted by: Dogbert on May 31, 2005 06:19 PMDogbert, the system sounds good, but would elections offices complain about the cost?
Posted by: Shannon K on May 31, 2005 06:58 PMTo expand on my prior post;
‘If the envelope is actually empty, or contains no valid ballot, there's no way at that point to go back and tie it to a particular voter and remove that voter's credit for voting. So it is possible to be credited with voting even though you have no ballot in the vote count -- but there is no way around that unless you want to eliminate secret ballots.’
There is always way if you apply yourself. I assume that what you mean is an invalid ballot (i.e. a primary ballot or one from a former election). A window could be put in both the outer and the inner envelope to expose a bar code on the ballot that must match the bar code on the outer envelope. We all pay bills that require us to line up the address of the payee in a window on the return envelope. Those that don’t can be sent to canvassing board to be verified for crediting. This may not be the optimal solution, but I am just one mind of many.
Are you sure you stated what you wanted to say correctly?
‘The key is that you can match an envelope to a ballot without being able to match a ballot to an envelope.’
My envelope, with my identity, can be matched to my ballot? But if my ballot is randomly pulled they can’t connect it to me? Where’s the secrecy in that?
A poster last week compared Chelan county (I think) with King County and showed how Chelan actually has a larger average number of ballots per precinct than King County and they had an order of magnitude fewer errors.
Nick Handy testified that the errors KC committed were normal, usual and acceptable.
I've worked for inventory companies and managed electronic component inventories. There is no way I would have kept my job with errors matching the "normal" level KC has admitted to.
Too bad government doesn't have to follow the Sarbanes-Oxley act.
Posted by: Jack on May 31, 2005 08:30 PMIt would be nice to start with a round of firings. I try not to rush into "off with their heads" mode, but the firing of Nick Handy would be a good way to signal that Sam Reed is serious about impartial and fair elections. I don't think there's any hope of Ron Sims firing any of his people, and if he did, he'd only replace them with like-minded get-out-the-Dem.-vote types.
Posted by: Shannon K on May 31, 2005 08:58 PMCould you imagine Huenekens and Logan messing w/ the books if they knew it mattered?
Posted by: righton on May 31, 2005 09:04 PMAfter the blizzard in Riyadh.
Posted by: Dogbert on May 31, 2005 09:12 PMPeople have given their lives for our right to vote. It is of much greater consequence that every LEGAL vote count then every penny balance in a company's annual report.
Posted by: Mark D on May 31, 2005 09:23 PM(grin)..well, at least for NOW...actually, I'm disappointed; thought him better than that; but I can fix THAT at the next election.
Bob--I liked ya; I voted for you; but...the mop's a-swingin' and da' floor is gettin' CLEANED! You play, you take the risks;
Posted by: Jimmie-howya-doin on May 31, 2005 09:32 PMEmpty envelopes do occasionally get to the openers. King County's spreadsheet indicates it happened either 69 or 73 times. (On line 22, someone put a minus 4, which caused that line to reconcile when that minus 4 was subtracted from the number of ballots that had supposedly been sent for opening. But what does a minus 4 mean? 4 ballots which used to be not there were suddenly found to be there? It's amazing how many puzzles their records present. Since the procedure for all others was to put a positive number in all the columns, it apparently means that 4 of the 236 accepted ballots in that batch disappeared, since a positive 4 would have shown exactly that via their spreadsheet's formula for checking the totals at each stage. One of those disappearing ballots somehow got counted by GEMS -- 211 supposedly went for tabulation, and 212 were tabulated by GEMS. Magic!)
I don't know how many times the wrong ballot was put in the envelope, since their spreadsheet doesn't have a column for that. Their false mail ballot report said it happened 89 times. (The false mail ballot report contained no figure for the number of empty envelopes.)
If anyone had put more than one ballot in an envelope but had only one voter's signature on the envelope, one or both would have been rejected after verifying the signature. The spreadsheet has no column for that. The false mail ballot report said it happened 203 times.
Since it appears that these things rarely occur, it seems simpler to keep a log of them and tally up the numbers at the end. Then, you would know why you have a few more voters credited with participating compared to the number of ballots sent through the vote tabulation system.
Posted by: Micajah on May 31, 2005 09:53 PM