After five months of public records requests, I finally have some answers on the mysterious claim made nearly a year ago by King County Elections that

Staff confirmed ... 251 federal write-in absentee ballots were tabulated. These represent validly cast ballots, that are not accounted for in the registration database.

The claim of "251 unregistered federal write-in ballots" was repeated ad nauseum in depositions (e.g. Huennekens p. 186, Way p. 34) and in the trial itself. Who were these 251 people, I wondered, and in which precincts were their ballots tabulated?

As I learned in July and August, only 113 such ballots had been located. Some of these were from voters who provided only a foreign address and no local address, yet were somehow assigned to a local precinct. By state and federal law, federal write-in ballots are to be counted only if the voter requests a ballot in advance of the election. Logan admitted in September that he has no documents confirming any such requests from these voters.

On Friday, I finally received definitive confirmation from Dean Logan that he has no documents to support the earlier claim of 251 and that there are no documented procedures for processing federal write-in ballots. If our local elections officials were more honest and forthcoming and our local media less lazy and credulous, we might have known about this bogosity before the election contest trial. Even if our local county and federal prosecutors are too craven to investigate what may well have been official fraud in a federal election, it's not too late to be more vigilant in time for the 2006 federal election.

Insisting that the processing of ballots is fully transparent and compliant with the law is not a partisan issue. Even if the Democrats prefer to excuse the 2004 performance as "mistakes" that didn't favor any candidate, it's in everybody's interest to ensure that any such "mistakes" are not repeated. Wishful thinking perhaps, but I hope that both major parties and the news media will hold King County Elections to a higher standard this time. We all need to insist before the next election that federal write-in ballots are processed according to laws and written procedures and that the results are fully documented and promptly disclosed to the public.