Nonpartisan voters baffle ballot machines

By Keith Ervin
Seattle Times staff reporter

Casting and counting the ballots of nonpartisan voters yesterday proved cumbersome — and for some voters, maddening — under the state's new primary-election system.

Among the disgruntled in King County was attorney Rhys Sterling, who learned the ballot box wouldn't accept his ballot because he voted only on nonpartisan races and issues.

After the machine returned his ballot, a poll supervisor at Hobart Community Church asked whether he had chosen a political party (he had not) and whether he had deliberately not chosen a party. His ballot was accepted only after the supervisor opened the machine and pressed a button overriding its programming.

"So much for secret ballots," said Sterling, who claims that yesterday's voting procedures violate the state constitution's guarantee of "absolute secrecy" in preparing and depositing ballots.

At some King County polling places, the override button either didn't function properly or workers didn't know how to use it. Stephen McCloskey watched a frustrated nonpartisan voter declare a party preference at St. Anne Church in Seattle because a poll worker couldn't find any other way to get a machine to accept the woman's ballot.

When a voting machine wouldn't accept David Miller's nonpartisan ballot at Crown Lutheran Church in Seattle, a poll worker put his ballot on the side of the machine to be counted later.

"This leaves my ballot unprotected for marking at a later time," Miller said.

Most counties complied with the state's new primary-election law by letting voters choose one of four alternate ballots: for one of the three major political parties or for nonpartisan voting only. King, Pierce, Snohomish, Kitsap, Chelan and Klickitat counties used "consolidated" ballots on which voters must declare a party in order for their votes to count in a partisan primary but were given no explicitly nonpartisan option.

King County tabulating machines were programmed to reject ballots without party declarations in order to prevent partisan voters from mistakenly submitting ballots on which their partisan votes wouldn't be counted.

The new method slowed up the absentee vote count in King and Pierce counties yesterday because ballots without party declarations had to be hand-checked by election workers to determine whether they contained partisan votes without expressed party preferences.

Dean Logan, director of King County elections, reported that the count of absentee ballots was reduced from the usual 1,000 per hour to a number between 300 and 500 yesterday morning.

Sterling, the lawyer from Hobart, suggested that the counting problems could have been avoided by offering voters a fourth choice at the top of the ballot: "none of the above."

Logan said state law prevented the county from offering that option.

"It wasn't the best-written piece of legislation," he said.

Nick Handy, the state's director of elections, said it is "a legal question" whether counties using nonpartisan ballots can offer a "none of the above" option. If it's legally allowed, he said, it would be "a pretty easy fix."

Pierce County Auditor Pat McCarthy said the "none of the above" option is "absolutely" a good idea.

Snohomish County's electronic touch-screen machines guided voters through the process without the problems of submitting valid paper ballots, said County Auditor Bob Terwilliger.