Citizens question elections director

By Keith Ervin

Seattle Times 28 January 2005

Most of the 348 provisional ballots in King County that were improperly counted at polling places Nov. 2 were cast by registered voters, county Elections Director Dean Logan said last night.

Logan told a standing-room-only crowd at a North Seattle church that 250 of the mishandled ballots "were in fact cast by valid, registered voters in King County who did not cast votes anywhere else."

Those provisional ballots constitute one basis of the state Republican Party's legal challenge of Democrat Christine Gregoire's victory over Republican Dino Rossi in the governor's race.

Members of the audience of about 150 people asked Logan a range of questions at a meeting hosted by Metropolitan King County Councilman Bob Ferguson at Maple Leaf Lutheran Church.

Except for an earlier League of Women Voters forum, it was the first time Logan has directly faced a crowd of citizens since a series of problems in the governor's race came to light. Logan is expected to go before the County Council sometime in the next two weeks to report on the election .

Logan said his office had "performed well" in the election, but he declined to offer a personal opinion on whether Gregoire's victory should stand.

Web log publisher Stefan Sharkansky claimed Logan's office has understated the discrepancy between ballots counted and identified voters. The county has said it doesn't know who cast 1,800 votes, but Sharkansky said the discrepancy is actually closer to 2,600.

"This is really an outsized discrepancy compared to what other counties are seeing," Sharkansky said. Logan earlier attributed much of the discrepancy to the failure of some poll workers to sign in all voters and the failure of other employees to correctly enter absentee-voter information into computers. "There is always going to be a margin of human error. Human error doesn't always equate to misconduct or fraud," he said.

Some poll workers made another kind of error, too: allowing voters to put provisional ballots directly into counting machines. Those ballots were supposed to be put in sealed envelopes so the voters' eligibility could be verified.

Logan said the county will test a new way to prevent the mishandling of provisional ballots in a Feb. 8 vote on two local levies, but he gave no details .
  
  
Logan agreed with one man's plea that the county get tough on those who cast illegal votes. Citing the case of voters who said they voted on their dead spouses' ballots to honor their loved ones' dying wishes, the elections chief said, "I wish they would prosecute those because it would get publicity, and it would stop people from doing that."

Audience members generally honored Ferguson's request that they speak politely. When computer-voting activist Andy Stephenson asked Logan a question and then interrupted the response, a woman shouted, "Sit down and let him answer the question!"

Ferguson passed out a survey to the audience and found a large majority favored moving primary elections from September to June or August. They also favored making the state's secretary of state a nonpartisan office.

But participants were split on whether elections should be conducted exclusively by mail and whether elections in King County should be managed by an elected auditor. King County is the only Washington county in which the top elections official is appointed.