King County ballot numbers don't add up

By Keith Ervin

Seattle Times     25 May 2005

 Half a year after the closest governor's election in state history, King County officials still can't say for sure how many people voted Nov. 2 or, in many cases, who voted.

In all, the county can't explain nearly 4,000 discrepancies between the number of votes counted and earlier tallies of ballots or people recorded as voting at the polls. In some cases, more ballots were counted than officials could account for, in other cases fewer.

The exact number of ballots cast may never be known because the accounting was marked by uncertainty, guesswork and error, a review of election records by The Seattle Times shows.

Attorneys for Republican gubernatorial candidate Dino Rossi have seized on King County's ballot-accounting problems as a key argument in their attempt to toss out last fall's election.

Democrat Christine Gregoire eked out a 129-vote victory in a manual recount of nearly 3 million votes statewide, after losing two machine counts.

The Republican contest of the election is being tried in Chelan County Superior Court.

By law, elections officials are supposed to account for each ballot cast. If they don't know how many ballots were filled out, they won't know if any are lost ? or added ? before the votes are tallied.

In King County, mistakes were made at every stage in that accounting process, interviews and elections records show.

Minimally trained temporary workers filled out inaccurate or incomplete voter reports on Election Day. A new computer system miscounted absentee ballots arriving in the mail. Top managers presented mistaken or misleading ballot-accounting summaries to the board that certifies elections.

The accounting task was complicated by heavy voter turnout, a record-breaking number of absentee voters and conversion to the new computer system. Close to 900,000 people voted in King County, more than 560,000 of them by absentee.
  
  
Some of the discrepancies could be due to voter error, such as someone carrying a ballot out of the polling place, or mailing in an empty absentee-ballot envelope.

But elections director Dean Logan, who initially downplayed ballot-accounting problems as relatively minor, said at a March 31 town-hall meeting that procedures "were not as they should be in King County."

Most of the unexplained discrepancies were among absentee ballots. None of those discrepancies were revealed in a key absentee-ballot report, nor were they passed on to the county canvassing board, which certified election results in November.

Some discrepancies were never investigated before the election was certified. As a result, officials weren't aware until March ? four months after the election ? that 95 valid absentee ballots weren't counted.

Poll workers overwhelmed
The first hint of ballot-accounting problems came at King County's 540 polling places, where poll workers were overwhelmed by the heavy turnout.

The process began with workers called precinct judges, who were supposed to account for every ballot by comparing the number of ballots handed out to voters with the counting machine's ballot count.

The numbers didn't always reconcile.

Poll workers made a multitude of mistakes on their "accountability sheets," entering numbers on the wrong lines, adding where they were supposed to subtract, and often leaving blank the number of ballots counted.

The busiest precinct judge Nov. 2 was Charlotte Parkinson, who signed in more than 800 voters from Snoqualmie Ridge.

"I don't think I ever looked up," she said. "It was one voter after another."

When the doors at the Snoqualmie Elementary School polling place closed, the counting machine recorded 26 more ballots than Parkinson thought she had given to voters.

In response to a question on the accountability sheet asking her to explain any discrepancies, Parkinson wrote: "Are you kidding? With 858 ballots handed out, a book falling apart and continuous voters from 7 a.m. to 8:45 p.m., never a break except for lunch ? I don't know!"

She wasn't the only one.

"Sorry, tried," wrote a precinct judge at Pine Lake Middle School in Sammamish, where the numbers also didn't reconcile.

Some poll workers balanced every number correctly. "All ballots accounted for!" wrote a jubilant judge at Samantha Smith School in Sammamish.

Processing and counting
Most absentee ballots first went through a processing center operated by a contractor, Kent-based PSI. Workers there separated the ballots by legislative district, put them into easily handled batches, and created data files linking each ballot envelope to a specific voter.

The ballots were then delivered to King County's absentee-ballot facility, south of downtown Seattle.

There, the ballots were counted three times as they headed toward the vote-tabulation machines: first as workers verified voters' signatures and eligibility; then when the ballot envelopes were opened; and finally when they went through the vote-counting machines.

The ballots were organized into batches of about 300 each. The number of ballots in each batch was recorded on a "batch slip" to make sure that no ballots appeared or disappeared without explanation.

But a spreadsheet summary of those numbers showed discrepancies in many batches. Between verification and opening, elections workers recorded a net decrease of 251 ballots, and between opening and vote tabulating, a net decrease of 158.

Those were net numbers, however. Tallying all the pluses and minuses separately shows an excess of 797 ballots in some batches between the first and last counts, and a shortage of 1,161 in others.

Some of the discrepancies should have raised red flags.

In a batch of ballots from Bellevue, Newcastle and Renton, for example, 50 fewer ballots went through the vote-tabulating machine in November than had been counted a week earlier by the envelope opener.

If a search was made at the time for those ballots, it was unsuccessful. An election worker found 48 of them, still uncounted, on March 24 in a box of what were thought to be empty envelopes. By April, 95 uncounted ballots had turned up.

After the mishandling of those ballots was discovered, Logan reassigned the absentee-ballot staff to other duties, launched an investigation and, after a separate mishap, placed four employees on paid administrative leave. The investigation, by an outside law firm, is continuing.

The county's mail-ballot supervisor, Nicole Way, who is now on leave, said in a deposition for the Republican lawsuit that the county didn't have a process for checking all the batch slips for discrepancies. Asked why not, she replied, "A lot of the batch slips sometimes just had bad data put into them."

Workers made notes explaining some discrepancies on batch slips, and a small number of batches were reviewed after votes were counted. But a lack of documentation has left officials uncertain how many discrepancies have been explained.

King County didn't compare its first count of absentee ballots with PSI's count.

The Seattle Times compared those numbers and found some big discrepancies: The county recorded a total of 27 more ballots in some batches than PSI did, and a total of 1,534 fewer ballots than PSI in other batches.

Those discrepancies don't necessarily mean ballots were lost. Election workers said their new computer system didn't keep track of ballots that were automatically rejected for legitimate reasons at the time of verification.

Way said workers verifying ballots knew how many were rejected, and she said she believed they were instructed to include them all in their first count. But if they didn't, that would explain some of the discrepancies.

Improvements promised
Elections director Logan has promised to improve the system in future elections.

"At the end of the day," he said in a recent interview, "those procedures are not up to the standard that should be met in order to document the results of an election."

In one of the first steps, officials gave the county canvassing board detailed precinct-level information about ballot-count discrepancies in a February special election. Logan wants workers to document their efforts to resolve discrepancies, and he has talked with officials in other counties about how to assemble a more-meaningful absentee-ballot report.

Elections officials here and elsewhere acknowledge that a large county like King cannot achieve perfection in its ballot accounting.

But, as Secretary of State Sam Reed points out, sloppy accounting puts the integrity of elections at risk. Ballots cast by voters must equal the total of ballots counted or rejected, he said.

"This is the way you check against stuffing the ballot box, and this is the way you check against ditching ballots in the courthouse."