87 valid, uncounted ballots found
King County says votes will not be tallied without court order

By GREGORY ROBERTS
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER   02 April 2005

Elections workers in King County have discovered 87 valid absentee ballots still in their envelopes that were mistakenly left out of the vote-counting in the November election, officials said yesterday.

The revelation is the latest in a series of missteps in the election committed by the King County elections department foul-ups that Republicans have seized on in their challenge to the outcome of the governor's race, in which Democrat Christine Gregoire defeated GOP candidate Dino Rossi by 129 votes after a hand recount of more than 2.8 million ballots cast.

"Outrage is too weak a word: We are just appalled," said state Republican Party Chairman Chris Vance. "They have made mistake after mistake after mistake after mistake."

Gregoire outpolled Rossi by 150,000 votes in King County.

Rossi has sued in Chelan County Superior Court to set aside the election. No date for the trial has been scheduled.

David McDonald, a lawyer for the Democrats in the case, welcomed the discovery of the ballots.

"Finding people whose votes should have been counted and allowing those votes to count is good," he said.

But he also said Rossi should accept his defeat.

"At some point, we've got to quit counting and chasing things," McDonald said.

  
 
The newly discovered ballots have been set aside and locked up and will not be opened or counted without a court order, elections officials said.

The first of the overlooked ballots was found March 24 by workers poring through absentee ballot mail envelopes in response to a Democratic request for information for the trial.

In their lawsuit, the Republicans have charged that hundreds of felons voted in the election contrary to a provision in the state constitution. In an ongoing follow-up investigation, King County prosecutors have so far identified nearly 200 felons who were illegally registered to vote.

Democratic lawyers want to make sure that any illegally registered felons cited by the GOP actually voted in the election, and they asked elections officials for documentation.

To vote by mail, a voter fills out the ballot, seals it in an unmarked security envelope and then places that envelope in an outer mail envelope. The voter then signs the outer envelope, which must be postmarked by Election Day to count.

When they get the envelopes, elections workers check the signature, registration and postmark. The outer envelopes for validated ballots are slit open by machine, and workers are then supposed to take out the security envelope, remove the ballot and count it. The empty mail envelopes are to be stored securely for 22 months, in accordance with state regulations.

But despite two machine counts and the hand recount, the newfound ballots were still sealed in the security envelopes within the outer envelopes, which had been slit open, officials said.

"Clearly, this further illustrates the systemic issues we face in King County to ensure that our processes and procedures are tightened and that adequate safeguards and documentation are in place to prevent these errors from occurring in the future," Elections Director Dean Logan said in a statement. "I will seek and secure whatever resources are necessary to prevent this from reoccurring."

The error is a repeat instance of "poor judgment and incomplete processing" in the handling of mail ballots, he said. Workers involved have been reassigned pending an investigation, he said.

More overlooked ballots may be discovered, officials said, but workers are close to the end of their search and the total is expected to increase only slightly, if at all.

In tabulating nearly 900,000 votes in the November election, including more than a half-million absentee ballots, King County officials also have acknowledged:

Nearly 660 provisional ballots were counted without the required validation. Provisional ballots are given to voters at polling places if their names do not appear on the rolls there, though they may be registered elsewhere.

Election workers mistakenly excluded 566 valid absentee ballots from both machine counts because they failed to check the voters' signatures adequately. A state Supreme Court ruling led to inclusion of those ballots in the hand recount after the signatures were verified.

Workers overlooked 20 absentee and two provisional ballots placed in the side compartments of voting machines. Officials included only the provisionals in the hand recount, because information on the ballot envelopes established they were cast on Election Day.