About 660 votes cast without verification
King County election director cites mishandling

By GREGORY ROBERTS
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER   15 March 2005

King County election returns likely included close to 660 provisional ballots that were tabulated in November without the required verification of voter eligibility, county election Director Dean Logan said yesterday.

Logan has come under intense scrutiny for his handling of the election Nov. 2 because of the extremely narrow margin in the governor's race, which Democrat Christine Gregoire won by 129 votes over Republican Dino Rossi after a hand recount. Rossi is suing in Chelan County Superior Court to set aside the result.

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

Logan appeared before the King County Council yesterday to field questions about the election.

County election officials had said earlier that 348 provisional ballots were erroneously fed into voting machines and thus included in vote totals. That represents the number of mishandled provisional ballots specifically attested to by poll workers, Logan said.

But the actual number is close to twice that, Logan said, because machine-read provisionals probably account for nearly all of the 660 adjustments to voting totals reported as part of a postelection reconciliation of polling.

Voters are issued provisional ballots when their names do not show up on the rolls at the polling place where they go to vote. The filled-out ballots are supposed to be set aside to be verified later. But if the voter feeds the ballot into the machine instead, it is counted, with no way to distinguish it from other ballots.

More than 31,000 provisional ballots were issued on Election Day what Logan called "staggering numbers." Of the provisional ballots properly handled, 83 percent were ultimately validated, Logan said.

The county changed its procedures for special tax elections in Auburn and Enumclaw in February, requiring poll workers to modify provisional ballots so machines would reject them. No reports were received of provisionals improperly handled, Logan said.

  
 
Republicans have said in the court case that the election should be thrown out because the number of disputed votes exceeds the margin of victory.

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.

Logan has said repeatedly there's no evidence of fraud in the November vote-counting, which was closely monitored by both major parties.

"I can tell you almost without exaggeration, when someone sneezed at a polling place on Election Day, we got a phone call about it," he said.

Republicans on the council yesterday explicitly disavowed any suggestion of willful wrongdoing.

But some GOP members pressed for tougher voting procedures.

In the November election, Logan said, King County election workers revised more than 60,000 ballots to record votes of people who marked their ballots incorrectly. Those voters may have circled candidates' names, punched holes or used check marks or red ink instead of filling in bubbles with dark ink that a machine can read.

But Republican Councilwoman Kathy Lambert said that if a machine can't decipher a ballot, it shouldn't count. Otherwise, she said, it opens the door to subjective or partisan interpretations.

"I think it's a dangerous precedent that we allow people to do whatever they want on the ballot and somebody else figures it out for them," Lambert said.

But Washington state laws promote efforts to discern voter intent, Logan said.

And Democratic Councilman Dwight Pelz said, "In our state, in a sense, we don't test you on your ability to follow instructions."

Republican Councilman Reagan Dunn argued for stricter controls over voter registrations to head off illegal voting by felons and other improprieties. King County prosecutors have identified 99 felons who voted illegally in November and are reviewing a GOP list of 834 supposed felons who participated in the election.

"We need to have a mechanism in place up front," Dunn said.

Logan said state and federal laws require officials to enroll anyone who fills out a registration form.