Pierce had vote foul-up, too
County says 164 unverified provisional ballots were cast

By GREGORY ROBERTS
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER   23 April 2005

If misery loves company, beleaguered King County elections workers may be pleased to know that their counterparts in Pierce County ran into problems of their own handling pesky provisional ballots in the 2004 election.

Republican Dino Rossi is suing to overturn his 129-vote loss to Democratic Gov. Christine Gregoire in the gubernatorial election, and the GOP has directed much of its legal and rhetorical fire at mistakes by the elections department in King County, where Gregoire outpolled Rossi by 150,000 votes.

Among those errors, King County Elections Director Dean Logan has acknowledged that close to 660 provisional ballots were tabulated without undergoing the required verification of the voter's registration. Republicans say new information shows that number is even higher.

In a filing this week in the Rossi lawsuit, which goes to trial May 23 in Chelan County, Pierce County officials owned up to 164 unverified provisional ballots in their vote count.

Provisional ballots are issued to voters at polling places if their names do not show up on the rolls there. The provisional voters are supposed to mark their ballots and place them in envelopes, on which they write their names, addresses and signatures for later verification of their right to vote.

But that system breaks down if the voters feed the ballots directly into vote-counting machines, which both King and Pierce counties install in individual polling places. Once counted, the provisional ballots can't be distinguished from other ballots.

King County officials have said that for the 348 mishandled provisional ballots they know about specifically, they have verified that all but 96 were cast by legal voters (although they don't know which 96 ballots are the unverified ones). In Pierce County, officials say they've verified all but 26.

State GOP Chairman Chris Vance said yesterday that in a deposition for the lawsuit, King County Elections Superintendent Bill Huennekens has placed the total of mishandled provisionals at 785, and the total that can't be matched with legal voters after the fact at 178.

With the Pierce report, "That's over 200 illegal votes in those two counties," Vance said. 
 
King County elections department spokeswoman Bobbie Egan declined to comment on Vance's numbers. Huennekens could not be reached for comment.

King County processed 31,000 provisional ballots in the election. In Pierce County, the total was 11,000.

The Republicans are lodging claims of foul-ups in handling ballots and of illegal votes by disenfranchised felons in hopes that Chelan County Superior Court Judge John Bridges will toss out Gregoire's victory.

In pretrial rulings, Bridges has said the GOP must show that Gregoire owes her win to illegal votes not just that the total of illegal votes exceeded her margin. Citing past court decisions, he also said that if there's no evidence of wrongdoing by the candidates and no way to know for whom a voter cast a ballot, that vote must be considered legitimate.

So the Republicans are pinning their hopes on an argument that the court should deduct improper votes from the totals of each candidate in proportion to the overall vote each candidate received in the affected precincts. Bridges has not decided if he'll consider that argument.

With Gregoire outpolling Rossi by 58 percent to 40 percent in King County, the GOP strategy would mean that the more improper votes that are discovered there, the greater the chance for Rossi to reduce Gregoire's lead.

"King County is big, and the bigger things are, the more likely you'll be able to find somebody who got confused or some piece of paper that's missing," Democratic lawyer David McDonald said. "And it's got a lot of Democratic precincts."

The Democrats say the proportional reduction method is not allowed under state law.

But in case Bridges sides with the GOP, they've been looking for offsetting errors in areas that supported Rossi; he topped Gregoire in Pierce County by 51 percent to 47 percent.