GOP chief accuses election office of misleading public on absentees at issue

By KATHY GEORGE
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER   20 December 2004

BELLEVUE Brandishing a newly released report that he called a "smoking gun," state Republican Party Chairman Chris Vance accused King County election managers yesterday of misleading the public about hundreds of uncounted votes in the still-unsettled governor's election.

Meanwhile, emotions flared as dozens of Democratic and Republican protesters faced off outside Republican Dino Rossi's gubernatorial campaign headquarters yesterday afternoon, exchanging cries of "Count every vote!" and "Do the math!"

At issue are 573 absentee ballots cast in the Nov. 2 election under the names of registered voters whose signatures were missing from King County's computer system.

The ballots were rejected because election workers could not immediately verify that ballot signatures matched voter signatures on file. A week ago, county elections director Dean Logan said that complete rejection was a mistake, that the ballots should have been set aside for verification using non-electronic signature records and that he was previously unaware of the mistake.

Democrats now want the ballots counted because they could place Christine Gregoire ahead of Rossi, who has narrowly led every count and recount so far in the historically tight governor's race. As of Friday, Rossi clung to a 50-vote lead statewide.

But Republicans maintain that it's too late, under the law, to count those ballots.

At a news conference yesterday, Vance handed out copies of a King County staff report, filed in court Friday by Democrats and reviewed over the weekend by Republicans.

The report said that the county had sent letters to 423 of the 573 voters whose signatures were missing from the system, asking for d signatures.

If a new signature was received and it matched the one on the ballot, the ballot was counted. But otherwise the ballots "were ... not tabulated and no research was done to find the voter's original registration form" before the Nov. 2 election results were certified, the report said.

  
 
The report also said that 101 voters who were sent letters in August "did not return a signature on the letter."

Vance said the report shows that election managers were working on the signature problem months ago, that the voters in question failed to fix the problem and that the managers misled the public in saying an error was discovered for the first time after Rossi was certified as the winner.

Rather, he said, the election managers are trying to change the rules at the behest of the elected Democrats who run the county.

"I am trying very hard not to call Dean Logan a liar," Vance said.

The election managers "had made a decision not to count these ballots. And then Larry Phillips started screaming. And that's when everything changed," Vance said, referring to the Democratic County Council chairman, whose vote is among the 573 at issue.

"Dean Logan works for Ron Sims. That's important," he added.

Both Democrat Sims, the county executive, and Logan were incensed by the GOP chairman's remarks.

"Mr. Vance said good things about King County Records and Elections when things were going his way," Sims said.

Now that Rossi's victory is threatened, "he is being bombastic. He is being incendiary and vitriolic. It's very unfortunate. But I don't believe that Mr. Vance or anyone else is going to be able to show that King County Elections acted inconsistently with the law."

Sims ran for governor himself, losing the Democratic primary to Gregoire. He said he "built a wall" between himself and the elections department to avoid any appearance of political influence.

"I have not been involved in any of the decisions that Mr. Logan has made," Sims said, adding that Republican King County Prosecutor Norm Maleng has guided every step of the election recount process.

Logan said Vance's suggestions of political influence are "offensive" and in "the realm of fairy tales."

As for the revelations in the staff report, Logan said there's actually nothing new. He said the county has never denied knowing about the missing voter signatures, and, in fact, sent letters seeking d signatures to 1,146 voters as "a list maintenance activity."

He said Vance wrongly emphasizes the fact that voters didn't respond. He said he knows that the voters whose ballots are in question are actually registered voters, and the only question is whether the ballots that were cast in their names were cast by them.

The mistake that he discovered a week ago, he said, was the staff's failure to set aside the 573 ballots for later review against non-computerized sources of signatures.

"I have no idea who these people voted for," he said. "It really has nothing to do with any political issue."

The staff report, prepared last week, dealt with 573 ballots for which voter signatures were unavailable, but on Friday the county said it found an additional 162 ballots that were likewise not counted. Also on Friday, a Pierce County judge barred King County from including those 735 ballots in its hand recount of the governor's race, capping a week of controversy in the wildest state political contest in memory.

Jack Oxford is one of the voters whose ballots weren't counted. At the Democratic protest yesterday, he said the court's message seemed to be, "It's the right of every American citizen to have your vote counted, except for yours, Jack."