Who Audits the Auditors?

Stefan Sharkansky  Blog    SoundPolitics   31 January 2005

County Auditors all over the state are complaining about the extra work they're having to do to respond to the election contest. Pierce County is moaning about the cost: "
It's a major monkey wrench in the machinery of Pierce County," said the county's deputy prosecuting attorney, Dan Hamilton, who said he and another attorney had spent the past two weeks almost exclusively working on the case. "A lot of the county's business is not being done because of just trying to manage this."
Oh, please. Documenting problems with the elections they run is the counties business. If Pierce and the other counties had done a cleaner job of managing the election in the first place, we wouldn't be going through this exercise.

One of the Auditors who has filed his own suit to dismiss the election contest on the grounds that it creates too much work for his office, is Snohomish County's Bob Terwilliger ("Sideshow" Bob Terwilliger?).

Terwilliger's office has not done a steller job of explaining its November election results. I've been requesting information about the reconciliation of ballots to voters. Two weeks ago Snohomish Elections replied with the information that:

1) 158 "Less voters [were] credited for voting at poll than tabulated"
and
2) 124 "Less Voters [were] credited for voting absentee than tabulated"

Less, fewer, whatever. The point is that Snohomish counted at least 282 mystery ballots that can't be tied to voters. I immediately posed some follow up questions. Were those 158 polling place votes from machine (Direct Record Electronic device, or DRE) votes? or from provisionals, which are handled and tabulated like absentee ballots? Did the number of absentee voters credited include "courtesy credits", which are for voters who return their ballots with late postmarks or other errors and get a "brownie point" credit for voting, even though their ballot isn't counted? Today I received this reponse:
1. Snohomish County does not track voter credit by DRE vs. provisional ballot voting. Therefore Snohomish County has no public records responsive to this question / request.

2. Snohomish County does not track ?courtesy credits?, which are given to voters who?s ballots were postmarked by election day, but not received by the Elections Division until after certification. Therefore Snohomish County has no public records responsive to this question / request.
In other words, (1) some number of unverified provisionals must have been counted, they just have no idea how many and (2) because the credit count includes "courtesy credits", the true number of mystery absentee ballots that were counted is higher than 124, they just have no idea how many.

If you live in Snohomish County, you should be upset about Terwilliger's sloppiness and lack of responsibility. At least you have the recourse of voting him out of office at the next election (assuming he counts your votes properly). Here in King County, we have no elected auditor, our election officials are appointed by the County Executive. A very sensible proposal is now being floated to create an elected auditor post. Astonishingly, yesterday's Seattle Times editorial came out against having an independent auditor, on the theory that an elections office that reports to Ron Sims would be more professional and less corrupted by politics than an auditor who is directly accountable to the public. If the Times is looking for ways to cut its expenses, a good place to start would be to lay off whoever wrote that editorial.

Yes, King County needs an elected auditor. And Snohomish, Yakima and a few other counties need to elect different ones.