It's in the P-I

Today's Seattle Post-Intelligencer editorial on the Secretary of State's voter database is wildly incorrect "Voter Registration: House cleaning"

Secretary of State Sam Reed's office has just completed an exhaustive compilation of state voters and purged more than 55,000 registrations across the state. But conspiracy theorists looking for "illegal voters" will be disappointed in the results.

Stricken from the rolls as invalid were 35,445 duplicate registrations ... The good news (except for those hoping for evidence of sweeping voter fraud) was that state officials found only 30 cases in which they suspect someone of having voted twice in the same election.

I'm not hoping to find "evidence of sweeping voter fraud", but I would like an accurate report about problems in recent elections. And what the P-I reports is simply not true. Elections officials know very well that there are many more than 30 double registrants who are suspected of double-voting in recent elections. The 30 are only people who voted twice in November 2005. It excludes everybody who didn't vote twice in November 2005, but voted twice in a prior election. The Secretary of State is downplaying the very serious problems that occurred on his watch, and on the watch of the county auditors, most of whom are running for re-election this year. And the reporters who covered this story should have been asking more difficult follow-up questions ---

I asked Steve Excell of the Secretary of State's office for a list of the 30 suspected double voters and for an explanation why they didn't include the nearly 180 suspected double voters from King County alone that I reported here and here. Excell sent this explanation:

Many of the names of potential “double voters” turned out to be either (1) two different people when the signatures were compared; (2) voters who were double-credited in error because someone signed the wrong line in the poll book; or (3) names left over from the Governor’s recounts and election contests which were already cleaned up or resolved.

There are more different people with the same name and same birth date than one would guess. We even had one case where the doppelganger voters lived in the same county on the same road…but were two different voters.

Some Auditors initially panicked when they saw the list of “possible” double voters. Once they checked signatures and/or pulled the poll books they resolved most of the cases.

The list of 30 is not the end of it. There are still more names to be investigated and more real cases could pop up as the process continues.

I also received this spreadsheet of the SoS list of suspected double voters. I ran it through my copy of the statewide database and came up with this enhanced spreadsheet, which shows the voters' counties and the date the voter last voted. As you can see, these are only people who voted twice in November 2005, and only a partial list at that. Trudy Wiseblood/Garman, who sure looks like a double voter who voted twice in November 2004, September 2005 and November 2005 and is still registered twice, is not on the list. Neither is Alfred T. Birnbaum/Birngaum (probably a case of forged signature, which is not exactly double voting, but not exactly any more reassuring)

As I wrote to Steve Excell and to some of the media people who repeated Sam Reed's claim of "only 30":

I can understand that the Secretary of State and the county auditors would prefer to forget about the recent debacles and focus on the commendable improvements. But the public deserves an honest reckoning of past mistakes. Otherwise, if we don't know what went wrong in the past, how can we be vigilant to ensure that the system is working well going forward? And why should we trust the inevitable future assurances that everything's fine when today's statements only downplay and cover up real problems?

Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at May 16, 2006 10:55 AM | Email This