More jumbled election numbers
Review of King County records in governor race resolves little

By GREGORY ROBERTS
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER   12 March 2005

A close accounting of King County polling-place records failed to resolve hundreds of discrepancies between the number of ballots cast and the number of voters who signed up to vote Nov. 2, elections officials acknowledged yesterday.

The report is the latest information released in the months-long squabble Democrats and Republicans are having over the governor's race. Democrat Christine Gregoire defeated Republican Dino Rossi in a hand recount by 129 votes out of more than 2.8 million statewide.

The Republicans are suing in Chelan County Superior Court to set aside that result. The GOP and Democrats seized on different aspects of the King County report released yesterday to bolster their positions in the dispute.

"The fact that they are admitting that they made errors larger than the margin of victory makes our case," GOP state Chairman Chris Vance said. "If it's impossible to know who won the election, you have to hold a new election."

But the judge in the case, John Bridges, has rejected that argument in pretrial hearings. Citing state law and previous court cases, Bridges has said the GOP needs to show that Gregoire apparently received enough improper votes to make the difference in the election.

What Bridges has not settled is how Republicans may demonstrate that.

Vance's Democratic counterpart, Paul Berendt, said the errors in the King County tabulation are relatively few.

"It was really not a very high number considering how large King County is and the number of people who are registered to vote here," Berendt said.

Gregoire outpaced Rossi in King County by more than 150,000 votes.

  
 
The "poll ballot reconciliation" provides a precinct-by-precinct comparison of the number of voter signatures and the number of ballots collected.

In precincts where signatures exceeded ballots, the difference countywide totaled 158. In those where ballots exceeded signatures, the difference totaled 216.

Considering that 334,185 ballots were issued in King County on Election Day in 540 polling places staffed by more than 3,000 poll workers, mistakes were bound to occur, said county Elections Superintendent Bill Huennekens.

"The elections process is a very human process," he said.

The report found no evidence of fraud, Huennekens said.

Where the number of voter signatures exceeded the number of ballots, some persons may have signed for and received a ballot but left without voting, officials said.

Where ballots exceeded signatures, poll workers may have mistakenly handed ballots to some voters without obtaining signatures, they said.

Information provided earlier by elections officials indicated 1,853 more ballots cast than voters credited with voting. But officials said at the time that that accounting reflected a far less formal process than does the reconciliation data released yesterday.

The reconciliation data addressed only polling-place voting, not the more than 560,000 absentee ballots cast in King County. The absentee voting accounts for hundreds of discrepancies, Vance said.

Republicans also have raised questions about illegal votes by felons and provisional ballots counted without verification. Provisional ballots are issued to voters whose names do not show up on registration lists at the polling place they vote at, but who may be legally registered elsewhere.

King County Prosecutor Norm Maleng this week identified 99 felons who voted illegally Nov. 2 and said he is reviewing a list of hundreds more supposed violations supplied by the GOP.

The reconciliation report showed 348 provisional ballots improperly tabulated without verification of voter eligibility, as reported earlier.

Huennekens said that of those, 252 were filled out by legal voters (although it's not possible to know which ballots were the legal ones); the identity of about 50 of the 348 voters could not be determined; and about 40 of those provisional ballots were cast by persons ineligible to vote.