Uncounted ballots and election jokes keep coming

By GREGORY ROBERTS
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

It's the election that will not die.

There were the recounts, the felonious voters, the lawsuit, the unreconciled votes and the problematic provisionals, all before last week's embarrassing discovery of 93 absentee ballots still uncounted in their envelopes.

Yesterday, for good measure, King County officials announced they had discovered one more uncounted ballot left over from the 2004 governor's race.

"If you had told me in November or December that they would be finding votes in April, I would say, 'No, I'm sorry not even King County is that bad,' " said John Carlson, the conservative KVI radio host.

"Guess what: They're that bad."

Five months after the election, officials are still double-checking their work and still finding problems while a Chelan County court prepares to hear arguments in the Republican Party's challenge to Gov. Christine Gregoire's 129-vote victory over Dino Rossi.

In response to a Democratic request for information for the lawsuit, elections workers in King County have pored through the 565,000 absentee ballot mail envelopes kept on file since the voting. Those envelopes, which include voters' names and signatures, are supposed to be empty, the ballots having been removed for counting in November.

But officials said last week they had discovered 93 valid ballots still in the envelopes and mistakenly left out of the vote count.

The news yesterday that they'd uncovered one more proved easy pickings for GOP gossips.

  
 
"They wonder if they'll find the Lindbergh baby in another pile of ballots next week," said Brett Bader, a longtime Republican consultant.

King County isn't the only home of uncounted ballots. Pierce County Auditor Pat McCarthy said yesterday her staff found 14 among their 255,000 absentee envelopes. Snohomish County found three among 200,000 envelopes, Auditor Bob Terwilliger said.

But the Republicans have trained their fire on King County, which gave Gregoire 150,000 more votes than Rossi on Election Day.

The 94th ballot was found when workers double-checked the earlier search and noticed a box of ballots that had not been marked to show it had already been inspected, said Elections Department spokeswoman Bobbie Egan. Some more uncounted ballots may yet be found, she said.

Errors acknowledged earlier by the department include counting provisional ballots without the required verification and overlooking hand-delivered absentee ballots in polling-place bins.

Meanwhile, Everett lawyer Paul Lehto wants a judge to void the Snohomish County contract with the supplier of its touch-screen computer voting system.

In a King County Superior Court lawsuit, Lehto and co-plaintiff John Wells of Edmonds claim it is illegal for the supplier, Sequoia Voting Systems Inc., to withhold certain information about its software that Lehto wants to inspect.

But Terwilliger said the information Lehto wants is proprietary and protected under the contract.

Based on a statistical analysis, Lehto has claimed that Rossi's Election Day reversal of Gregoire's lead among absentee voters was "a true impossibility."

"I don't buy that," Terwilliger said.