I e-mailed this inquiry to King County Elections yesterday regarding the apparent irregularities with the Federal Write-In ballots that I posted earlier this week. Bobbie Egan replied today that she's out of the office with an injury and will get back to me upon her return.
I also sent a similar inquiry to state Elections Director Nixon Handy. No response yet.
Bob Edelman of the Evergreen Freedom Foundation forwarded this e-mail on the subject of military ballots that he recently obtained from the Secretary of State's office.
Federal write-ins are acceptable if you have an absentee request on file for that voter.It also confirms that overseas, out-of-state and service voters who request a ballot are to be registered. Odd, then, that the voters who submitted the federal write-ins that I discussed in the earlier post do not show up in the rolls as registered. Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at August 24, 2005 05:47 PM | Email This
Or a tutorial "How to file a FOIA with the State of Washington?" Is it something one can do without retaining legal counsel?
Posted by: Al on August 24, 2005 06:13 PMMaybe we need Jimmy Carter as an elections observer? (*hack* *snort* *guffaw*)
Posted by: dan on August 24, 2005 09:48 PMIncredible! How can we have such blatant proof of yet more illegal votes from November and nothing is being done on the Federal level?
Is losing one state in the union - to corruption and ineptitude in the election process - worth it to the nation as a whole? I would consider this a dire matter of national security!
Posted by: Deborah on August 25, 2005 12:26 AMPlease don't imagine for a moment that Gregoire won the election. She won the coup by euchre not choice. Let liberal fools believe otherwise. The only way we will regain any semblance of democracy in Washington is if the conservative majority votes in earnest from here on. A united Republican party can make that happen. We have the numbers; do we have the will?
I think we do.
What were they trying to accomplish? And why?
Was it some federal law that pushed them toward such a strange outcome?
Note that registering to vote by mail apparently wasn't authorized by WA law until 1993 (Session Laws, 1993 chapter 434 section 3).
An unregistered but otherwise qualified prospective voter who was not in WA to register in person would have been in a bind. Was there a desire to remove that obstacle?
Since the obstacle no longer exists, why not simply have out-of-state, overseas, and service voters register like everyone else?
Even if there was a last-minute problem, the Federal Post Card Application for registration and a ballot is easily available and easy to use.
WA's election bureaucrats seem to have no idea how to handle the contradictory mess that they and the legislature have made of the laws. Perhaps they could benefit from figuring out what was intended in the 1980s--and dumping things that are no longer needed.
There appears to be no reason at all to avoid following a simple rule: Only registered voters are eligible to participate in WA elections--and that doesn't mean that voter registration can magically appear out of nowhere when someone claiming to be a WA elector signs the outside of an envelope.
Posted by: Micajah on August 25, 2005 06:44 PMYou might want to "bookmark" this Kitsap County Auditor web page about military and overseas voters, so you can compare it to whatever you get from others.
It seems that county election officials don't all do the same. And it also appears that there is no one who will put it in writing in public that a "FWAB" is acceptable to vote on state and local offices and issues. (Of course, since there is no statute in Washington that authorizes the use of any absentee ballot other than the one issued by the county auditor to vote in state and local elections, there may be a reason why no one posts or publishes a statement that the FWAB can be so used.)