The most maligned people at King County Elections

These are some photos of the King County Elections workers who are the most maligned (by senior elections officials):


Pictured above are canvassing workers wanding the poll books to give credit to poll voters. Whenever the number of votes fails to reconcile with the number of voters, these are the folks who get blamed by Dean Logan and his ilk, often for things they did not do. For example, remember this P-I article from February 2005, quoting L.A. election director Conny McCormack, now Dean Logan's boss -- "Election expert praises King County":

After election results are certified, election workers electronically scan voters' signatures into records. The purpose is to record, for future elections, who voted in the last one so that registration files can be purged of inactive voters and political parties and campaigns can obtain voters' names and voting-frequency data.

Logan and McCormack said that record-keeping process, which they said is susceptible to human error,

Actually, the wanding occurs before the election is certified (these pictures were taken two weeks ago). This is done in part to prevent provisional ballots from being counted if the voter also voted a normal poll ballot. It was also the case that the reconciliation discrepancy in 2004 was largely attributable to severe errors accounting for mail ballots, which have nothing to do with poll books and which the article neglected to mention.

But the funniest case of misplaced blame of the poll book scanners was perhaps Dean Logan's testimony in Nicole Way's arbitration hearing this summer. (this transcript, p. 176). The question pertains to 390 ballots that were apparently uncounted in the September 2005 primary. (Nicole Way was on leave when this screw-up occurred):

Attorney for Ms. Way: Well, what would be the difference for the 390 ballots, the difference between the ballots cast and credited?
Logan: It could be data entry errors. It could be errors made by poll workers in terms of voters not signing the poll book, or it could be errors in staff when they are scanning the poll books to give credit for voting.

Uh, this particular discrepancy was entirely in the mail ballots. It had absolutely nothing to do with any poll books.

Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at November 27, 2006 01:15 PM | Email This