GOP announces 'bombshell' in voting
Vance produces election worker who raised ballot questions

By NEIL MODIE
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER   05 January 2005

Escalating his daily drumbeat for a revote for governor, state Republican Party Chairman Chris Vance said yesterday that hundreds of unverified provisional ballots may have been wrongly counted in King County in the Nov. 2 election.

Vance called it a "bombshell" in the Republicans' case for invalidating Democratic Gov.-elect Christine Gregoire's 129-vote victory over Republican Dino Rossi in a second recount of 2.9 million votes cast, and added, "There may be many smoking guns."

Gregoire won 57.7 percent and Rossi 40 percent of King County's 900,000 votes. Vance has focused on the state's biggest, most reliably Democratic county in pointing to errors in the governor's election and calling for a new vote.

He cited an admission by a King County election official that an unknown number of provisional voters may have improperly placed their ballots directly into vote-tabulating machines before it was determined whether they were eligible to vote.

Provisional ballots are issued to people who go to polling places but aren't listed on voter registration rolls in the precinct.

"I think the only way of settling this certified mess of an election is a revote," Vance said.

King County elections supervisor Bill Huennekens yesterday did not return repeated calls seeking his response to the accusations.

At a Bellevue news conference, Vance produced a Republican-appointed King County election worker, Joe O'Donnell, who said he personally witnessed about 150 to 300 provisional ballots go straight into AccuVote tabulating machines on Election Day without any voter verification.

O'Donnell, a college student, said he pointed out the improprieties to polling place supervisors, but by then it was too late to separate the ballots of questionable validity from other ballots.

  
  
And Ruth Bennett, the Libertarian Party candidate who got 2.3 percent of the statewide vote for governor, said at the news conference that she, as a King County election worker, observed provisional ballots that were improperly secured.

She also said there was no consistency in how election workers determined voter intent of ambiguously completed ballots.

Democratic Party officials, however, scoffed at what party spokeswoman Kirstin Brost called the Republicans' trumped-up election "outrage of the day. None of them has amounted to anything at this point."

And county election officials continued to take umbrage at what they said were the Republicans' unwarranted suggestions that election fraud occurred. The officials blamed the accusations on a misunderstanding of why the number of votes cast in the Nov. 2 election may have been several thousand more than the number of people credited with voting.

"It's not fraud. It's not understanding how the elections process really works and then it's this stirring of the pot with inaccurate information," said Carolyn Diepenbrock, the Snohomish County elections manager.

Vance said the Republican Party is still researching whether ineligible voters around the state may have been allowed to cast ballots and added, "We continue to collect new information, new data, new evidence," including death certificates and prison records.

He declined to say what legal, political or other action the party might take and when it might occur.

Gregoire's inauguration is scheduled for Wednesday, but GOP legislative leaders have said they might try to prevent the Legislature from certifying the results of the governor's race. Republicans would have until Jan. 22 to file a court challenge to the election.

Bennett called for a new gubernatorial election, with herself as well as Gregoire and Rossi once again on the ballot. Given the sliver of gubernatorial votes won by herself, she noted, "51 percent of the people in this state" voted against each of the other two candidates.

King County elections spokeswoman Bobbie Egan said yesterday that 31,545 provisional ballots were issued in King County. Of that number, 27,641, or 87 percent, have been validated and included in the official count.

King County and several other counties are reconciling their lists of voters in the Nov. 2 election to try to resolve the discrepancy between the number of votes cast and the number of voters listed.

County officials have said there are several possible explanations, such as voters who moved after the election, voters who were previously classified as "inactive," or those who signed poll books in the wrong place.

But based on historical data, King County officials have said the reconciled lists could include 1,000 to 1,500 more votes than voters accounted for even after the lists are reconciled.

Snohomish County's Diepenbrock said the 300-vote discrepancy in her county was probably due mostly to human errors in the tedious, labor-intensive, post-election process of entering general election voters' names into files as part of the process of updating voter records for future elections.

"I would like to say there should never, ever, ever be any discrepancy. But that's not reality," Diepenbrock said. She added, "It's unfortunate that this (vote) crediting process is being attached to the election process," because they are separate, unrelated procedures.