Anyone watching Tuesday's election?

By Jerry Cornfield
Everett Herald    18 September 2005

It's been 10 exhausting months in the world of Washington's elections.

Battle fatigue started in November when polls closed on the closest race for governor in state history, a campaign decided after three tallies and a bruising six-month court clash.

While lawyers fenced, legislators passed 11 laws aimed at stamping out election fraud and error, whose pervasive manifestations were uncovered in the very public and very gory autopsy of the governor's election.

Voters vented daily in a thunderclap of criticism that reverberated online and echoed on radio talk shows. Officials in charge had no escape.

Tuesday marks their first major test to demonstrate that they can count every ballot efficiently and correctly. Given all the past attention, one might expect an army of monitors deployed at polling places to make sure.

Not so. The intensity is gone. Those hot under the collar the past 10 months seem to be giving this one a pass.

In Snohomish County, no new Democrat or Republican representatives trained to be election observers or showed up for testing of the electronic voting machines.

When county Auditor Bob Terwilliger needed party designees to machines for use as a control group Tuesday, he had to look to county workers to find a Democrat and a Republican to step in.

What little attention political parties are expending is focused on King County, where the largesse of mistakes - and the decisive votes for governor - occurred.

Republican Party operatives say their activists are simply exhausted and frustrated that the Legislature didn't pass the reforms they most sought.

They wanted voter rolls erased and every voter forced to re-register. They also sought to require people to show photo ID before voting.

That makes purging illicit voters beforehand for this primary as impossible today as it was a year ago, they said. It won't be easier until a statewide database tracking felons and dead people comes into use in 2006.

Interest is also down because Tuesday's ballot lacks statewide races and issues to get riled about. November will be different, with five initiatives on the ballot, and observers may return in force next year in the race for the U.S. Senate.

The Evergreen Freedom Foundation continues to bang the drum of election integrity loudly. Last week, Bob Williams, the foundation's president, charged that 16 problems persist that could prevent a clean primary.

This group is finding less visible support among lawmakers than it did a few months ago - a sign that the politics of reform may be more about politics than reform.

"The parties are only interested when they have something at stake," Freedom Foundation spokesman Booker Stallworth said. "If a party's candidate wins, they don't see a problem, and if a party's candidate loses, that's the only problem they see."

State Republican Party Chairman Chris Vance disagreed.

"Of course we're going to be watching. It won't be nearly as closely as we will in November," he said. "We're not going to lose any elections next Tuesday."