Seeing Double

Deanron says he "are serious about cleaning the voter rolls and protecting the integrity of the elections process". No, really. October 12, 2005:

"Bottom line is that it is a felony to vote twice and we have safeguards like signature verification in place to keep people from voting twice. If someone has evidence that a voter has voted twice, we would like to have that information to forward to the Prosecuting Attorney.

If that's what Deanron wants, that's what Deanron will get. Here is a list of 154 people who appear to have been credited with voting twice in King County in November 2004. Yes, 154. I'm shocked that the number is so high. It seems a little, well, late to be bringing this up now that Mrs. Gregoire has been prancing around the Capitol for an entire legislative biennium. But it's only now with the combination of the partial transaction log I received in December and the most recent statewide voter database that I have enough information to pull this all together. This now brings the number of known ineligible votes that Deanron unlawfully counted in 2004 to nearly 700, or more than 5 times the margin of Mrs. Gregoire's (don't laugh) "victory". Appallingly, none of these 700 bogus votes tabulated because of election office "mistakes" were mentioned at the contest trial. Deanron had to have known about many if not all of these irregularities, but chose not to share any of this information with the litigants. And the various blue-ribbon task forces that were obsessed with Deanron's management "culture" were all too lazy and/or partisan to look at his actual workproduct. So much for transparency and voter confidence.

Asst. Secretary of State Steve Excell has also encouraged the users of the statewide database to report suspected cases of double voting. So here it is, the names of the 154 individuals who appear to be credited with voting twice in 2004. And, by the way, 56 of them were still registered twice as recently as two weeks ago.

Not all 154 will turn out to be double voters. A few might turn out to be amazing coincidences of individuals with identical names and birthdates. Some of them will have been credited in error. Some may have had a ballot stolen and voted by another person. One was credited twice even though he mailed in one of his ballots, unused, along with this note asking that only his other, separately mailed and completed, ballot be counted. (His second registration wasn't cancelled until the next October after they mailed him two ballots for the November 2005 election). But out of 154 people credited twice, I suspect that a substantial number will turn out to have voted twice. Indeed, I found a number of these ballots even when I had a much smaller list of ballots to look for. These 3 pairs of double votes are on the list (Salaam, Hong, Benazouz/Boucenna)

I'm skeptical that anybody in authority will actually do anything about these 154 doubly credited voters. The Secretary of State, the King County Prosecutor and especially Deanron are all highly motivated to sweep under the rug the 2004 debacle in which they all had a hand. Indeed, I already reported some of these suspected double voters nearly a year ago. On April 28, 2005 I sent the King County Prosecutor this email with a list of 28 pairs of individuals with identical names and addresses both voting absentee. I cc'ed a member of Deanron's staff. I didn't have birthdates back then, and as I acknowledged at the time the list probably contained a few false positives (e.g. parent/child pairs). But 13 of the pairs of suspected doubles on the list turned out to have mattching birthdates and are almost certainly the same person. One of these was Patricia Levesque, who continued to return two ballots in both the Primary and General elections of 2005. 5 of the final 13 are still registered twice (Click on the "Still Duplicate" links in this PDF file to see for yourself). But hope springs eternal, Norm Maleng and Deanron keep protesting that they'll enforce election laws, so maybe someday they really will.

The number of double votes is important not only because it could fairly discredit the result of the bungled 2004 election. It is also important because it highlights the importance of keeping clean voter rolls. And it is especially important as a window into Deanron's integrity, competence and commitment to honest and transparent elections. The facts don't look good for Deanron.

It appears Deanron took some exceptional measures to relax integrity checking during 2004. In order to save time in processing the flood of Presidential year registrations, any time a voter submitted a registration form, even intending only to update an existing registration, a brand new registration was created. Presumably nobody knew how close the ensuing election would be. But Deanron's staff knew this was a bad idea and it was implemented over their objections.

This boneheaded policy appears to have created 10,000 extra duplicate registrations, which predictably caused thousands of voters to receive extra absentee ballots -- some of which turned into redundant votes. If you look at the voter id columns in the spreadsheet, I've highlighted in pink the ones where at least one of the registrations was created in 2004. More than 3/4 of the double voters were using at least one 2004 registration.

Deanron had to have known the consequences of the redundant registrations soon after the election was certified. On January 14th, barely a week after the contest lawsuit was filed, Deanron's people ran a duplicate registration report. (It was released in response to a GOP records request last July). It's 824 pages resembling this one. They had to suspect that some of the duplicates had doubly voted in November. Indeed, they started deleting the duplicate registrations in mid January. If you look at the spreadsheet list of the 154 double voters, the righmost "DELETED" column indicates when the redundant registration was deleted. It seems implausible to me that the elections staff could research the duplicate registrations thouroughly enough to be satisfied that the registration they were about to delete was redundant, without noticing that both registrations in the pair had just voted.

Yes, it's good that Deanron at least started to clean up the duplicates. But the way they went about it is disturbing. Most of the duplicate registrations were not cancelled, but deleted. Meaning that they were wiped out of the database, instead of put on the "cancelled" list which creates a clean record and is supposed to be retained for two years (and if a registration is cancelled in error, it can be later reinstated). A deleted record is gone. The only way I know about the deleted records is by discovering the trace of their removal in the partial transaction log. Even more disturbing is that Deanron kept quiet about the large number of duplicates, let alone the double votes. If he had a shred of integrity he would have volunteered this information to the public which was seeking to understand what really happened in the election. But he didn't offer this information to the public or the litigants in the contest lawsuit. By covering up his own negligence, he effectively prejudiced the court to procure a partisan outcome.

By October 12th of last year, when the GOP filed its challenges of duplicates, Deanron had already deleted 8,700 redundant registrations. But thousands more remained on the rolls and were still eligible to vote twice in November 2005 (including some of the people on the list that I sent to the PAO back in April) Deanron's pissy reaction to the GOP challenges aside, the challenges did prompt him to properly cancel 900 duplicate registrations after their absentee ballots had been mailed out. At least 1,500 additional duplicates were deleted or cancelled by the end of the year. But thousands more King County voters remain registered twice, even some who have voted twice and were reported to the authorities last year.

UPDATE: The original version of this post reported that 156 possible double voters had been identified. That number was reduced to 154 after I received information that some might have been on the list in error.

Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at March 16, 2006 03:41 PM | Email This