King County election chief under fire
Two Republican council members call on Logan to resign

By GREGORY ROBERTS
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER    05 April 2005

The top election official in King County should resign, two Republican members of the County Council said yesterday in reaction to the latest blunder to come to light in the troubled election department.

That problem the discovery during the last 10 days of 93 valid mail-in ballots mistakenly left out of the vote count in the November election triggered angry reactions from both Republican and Democratic council members.

But the performance of election director Dean Logan was endorsed yesterday by his boss, King County Executive Ron Sims, who appointed Logan in 2003 to straighten out earlier problems in the department.

"I continue to have full faith and confidence in Director Dean Logan and believe the people of this county are best served by allowing him to finish the election reforms needed," Sims said in a statement.

Logan was traveling with his family on vacation and was not available for comment yesterday, election department spokeswoman Bobbie Egan said.

The GOP in January filed suit to set aside the results of the governor's election, which gave Democrat Christine Gregoire a 129-vote victory after a hand recount of more than 2.8 million ballots cast statewide. Much of the Republican fire has been concentrated on King County, where Gregoire rolled up a 150,000-vote plurality. The trial of the lawsuit has not begun.

Republican Councilmen Steve Hammond and Reagan Dunn have both sent Logan letters urging him to resign.

In addition:

The six GOP members of the council signed a letter to the U.S. Justice Department requesting an investigation to determine if fraud was committed in the processing of more than 900,000 King County ballots in the November election.

  
 
In yesterday's council meeting, Democratic council members Julia Patterson and Bob Ferguson called for an independent audit of Logan's department. They said that at an upcoming meeting, they will ask the council to direct Sims to hire a major accounting firm or other experts to do the job.

Republican Councilman David Irons, who is challenging Sims' re-election in the fall, pressed for Logan to appear before the council Monday to answer questions about the latest problem.

"We can't have things pushed behind a door and semi-covered up for a week," Irons said.

Ferguson also was upset about the lag between the time election workers discovered the first uncounted ballots and when the council heard about it.

"The first priority of the elections department is to let the executive, the council and the public know what is happening," Ferguson said. "That didn't happen this time, and that's wrong."

Ferguson stopped just short of joining the requests for Logan's resignation.

"On any issue, you have a tipping point," he said. "If I'm not at that tipping point now, I'm close to it."

While responding to a Democratic request for information in connection with the lawsuit, election workers discovered March 24 that 48 valid mail-in ballots were overlooked in the November tabulation, Egan said. The ballots had been left inside their envelopes, which are stored for 22 months after a major election.

At that point, Logan ordered a search of the more than 565,000 mail-in ballot envelopes on file, Egan said. He also decided that information of the discovery would not be made public until the search was complete, she said.

"We needed to find all of those ballots and report them as one number," Egan said. "The fact of the matter is, we weren't hiding anything."

Media inquiries on Friday led to the disclosure that 87 uncounted ballots had been found to that point; the final number, announced Saturday, was 93.

Egan said elections officials were criticized in December when accounts of another electoral surprise trickled out over several days.

In that instance, officials first announced that 573 valid absentee ballots had been mistakenly excluded from the initial machine counts because workers failed to check the voters' signatures adequately, and days later amended that number to 735. A state Supreme Court ruling led to inclusion of 566 of those ballots in the hand recount after the signatures were verified.

That was one of the earlier blunders acknowledged by Logan. Others included:

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.

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 and not added later.

In addition, King County prosecutors have said nearly 200 felons were illegally registered to vote, and they are investigating hundreds more alleged illegal registrations.