Washington Vote Fraud Exposed

Crunching the data in the King Ukraine County voter registration file, I came across precinct SEA 37-1823, or simply Precinct 1823, located in downtown Seattle between Elliot Bay and I-5 near the James St. exit.

Precinct 1823 has 763 registered "Active" voters. 527 of them list as their residence address 500 4th Ave -- the King County Administration Building. 241 of these voters specifically note their apartment number as #553, which is the room number of the ... King Ukraine County Records and Elections office.

Over 300 of these alleged "voters" give 500 4th Ave. (with or without the Elections office room number) as both their residence and mailing addresses. Several of the other Elections Office residents give overseas mailing addresses, such as Anuj Rathi of Mumbai, India, Rayko Suzuki of Tokyo, Japan, and Pascal Engi of Bern, Switzerland.

Another 48 of the Precinct 1823 "voters" give as their residence address 511 3rd Ave, which appears to be some sort of private mailbox service.

And then there are the two Messrs. Harder -- Mike Harder of 509 3rd Ave. Apt. 507, who registered to vote on April 28, 2004 and Michael D. Harder of 509 3rd Ave. Apt. 507, who registered to vote on July 20, 2004. Both Messrs. Harder are flagged as permanent absentee voters. [while it is possible that this is, say, a father and son, I believe that is unlikely in this case. There is one additional voter registered at this apartment and in the same time frame. The only other apartments in this building have only one or two registered voters each. i.e. it's doubtful that any of the apartments in the building would house 3 or more adults].

465 (61%) of the Precinct 1823 voters registered during 2004 and nearly all of them "live" at 500 4th Ave. By contrast, only 13% of all of King County voters registered in 2004.

3 members of the List of 573 Magical Mystery Voters are from Precinct 1823, 2 of whom "live" at the Elections Office.

In the machine recount, Precinct 1823 gave 203 votes to Gregoire and 87 votes to Rossi, for a net Gregoire lead of 116 votes.

The only way for Christine Gregoire to win the governor's race is to carry Precinct 1823 in a landslide.

UPDATE: Elections Superintendent Bill Huennekens explained that the residents of the Elections office are "homeless individuals", and that there is a special section of the administrative code which allows for that. He sees nothing unusual in the fact that some of these so-called homeless individuals also give mailing addresses elsewhere. I asked him what the county did to verify the identities of individuals who list the elections office as their residence and he said that they can't be treated any differently from anybody else. I take that to mean, that anybody on the planet who wants to vote (or vote again) can simply claim to be a resident of the King County Elections office.

UPDATE 2: I heard John Carlson discuss the Precinct 1823 findings on his show this afternoon. A police officer informed him that 511 3rd Avenue is not a private mail service, but a flophouse, most of whose residents are felons. Carlson also discussed Precinct 1823 with County Councilmember Larry Phillips, who made a bland statement about correcting faulty voting procedures. State Auditor Brian Sonntag had a good laugh at some of the weirder details from Precinct 1823, but also said very seriously that people elsewhere in the state have gone to jail for vote fraud and that the irregularities in King County need to be investigated.

King County like all counties is guided by the same law which allows the homeless to register to vote using a county building as an address.

WAC 434-208-100 Registering to vote -- Nontraditional address. No person registering to vote, who meets all the qualifications of a registered voter in the state of Washington, shall be disqualified because of a nontraditional physical address being used as a residence address. Nontraditional addresses may include shelters, parks or other identifiable locations which the voter deems to be his/her residence. Voters using such an address will be registered and precincted based on the location provided. Voters without a traditional address will be registered at the county courthouse, city hall or other public building near the area that the voter considers his/her residence. Registering at a nontraditional address will not disqualify a voter from requesting ongoing absentee voter status provided the voter designates a valid mailing address.

I never alleged "conspiracy", only sloppy administration. Still no word how the county protects against double or otherwise fraudulent registrations. Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at December 22, 2004 11:26 AM Categories: 2004 Governor's Race

Precinct 3301

Precinct FED 30-3301, or simply Precinct 3301, is located in Federal Way in south King County off I-5. I've never been there and I don't know much about it except that it helps illustrate why this election, in Dino Rossi's words, is a "total mess" and needs to be nullified.

Now that King County has released the precinct canvass for the manual recount, we can see how Precinct 3301 voted in each of the three counts

Count	Gregoire	Rossi	Bennett	Write-in	Undervote	Overvote	Total
Initial	191	142	14	0	8	0	355
Machine	191	143	14	0	8	0	356
Manual	191	141	13	0	7	0	352

An interesting thing about the manual recount, which a lot of people, including myself, didn't pay enough attention to, is that in addition to the 566 magical mystery ballots that were added on Dec. 23, King County also added 59 other unexplained magical mystery ballots to their vote count on Dec. 22.

In fact, it wasn't as simple as merely adding 59 ballots, they actually added a net total of 325 ballots to some precincts and removed a net total of 266 ballots from other precincts.

Precinct 3301 is one of the precincts that lost ballots. How can this happen? It's not that marks were interpreted differently. It's that pieces of paper disappeared in one count, or only existed in somebody's imagination in an earlier count. We're assured that in every case the diligent election workers tallied and retallied and checked each others numbers and that their ballot counts were perfect! Every time they changed they were perfect! The process is perfect, except for those four annoying pieces of paper that somehow disappeared from Precinct 3301 during the manual recount, and the other 262 pieces of paper that somehow disappeared from all those other precincts, and the 325 other pieces of paper that magically materialized somewhere else.

We know a little bit about what happened in the machine recount. A new ABSENTEE ballot for Dino Rossi somehow materialized in this precinct. But we don't yet know what kinds of ballots were lost in the "more accurate" manual recount, because the precinct canvass for the manual recount doesn't include that information.

But fortunately, this time we now also know how many voters voted in Precinct 3301. The King County voter file tells us that 354 citizens voted in Precinct 3301 -- 252 Absentee, 85 Polling Place and 17 Provisional. 354 voters cast valid ballots, of which only 352 can be located.

Precinct 3301 isn't the only precinct that has more voters than ballots, it only came up on the top of my list because it lost the most ballots in the manual recount. In fact, 684 out of 2,616 precincts have more voters than ballots, for a total of 1,512 ballotless voters. Were these ballots simply lost? Did the elections office (contrary to instructions) release a file that reflects changes in voters' addresses and precincts that have occurred in the weeks since the election? Or what? We may never know.

And that's just one more example of why this election is a "total mess" and why we need to set it aside and move on to a revote.

UPDATE: I thought to cross-reference the Dec. 29 voter file against the Nov. 1 voter file to see if any voters have changed precincts. Some have. One more strike against KC Elections. I specifically asked for the voter list to describe the voters as of the day of the election. Inter-precinct migration explains only 1 of the Precinct 3301's 2 ballotless voters. There are still at least 353 voters who cast ballots in Precinct 3301 on the day of the election, but only 352 of these ballots were counted. I'll work on a comprehensive analysis of all precincts.

Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at 12:34 AM | Comments (6)
Categories: 2004 Governor's Race

December 30, 2004

The Seattle Times' Misleading Database

The Seattle Times website has now posted a nifty tool where you can look up King County voters in their database and it's supposed to tell you if and how they voted. [It appears to be based on the same county datafile that I obtained yesterday]

Problem: The Times database is incomplete and somewhat misleading.

Most of its data seems to be correct. For example, you can look up "Sharkansky" and it will correctly tell you that I live in Seattle 98103 and that I voted at my polling place. They even spell "Stefan" correctly.

BUT, "most" is only good enough for horseshoes, hand grenades and the King County elections office. It's not good enough for a newspaper which is attempting to tell you what the King County elections office did to your ballot.

It completely ignores the nearly 170,000 "Inactive" status voters, most of whom have genuinely dropped out of the voter universe for one reason or another. But inactive voters are not the same as cancelled voters and they're still eligible to vote. Indeed, 3,220 of KC's Inactive voters cast valid ballots this election. Unfortunately, if you look up any Inactive voter in the Seattle Times database, it will tell you that the voter is "not found", even if their ballot was counted.

Oops, moments after I posted my initial version of this post I had a brainwave to delve deeper on a point of fact and I now retract some statements that were posted here for a couple of minutes. My error. If you're reading this post for the first time, "never mind"

Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at 11:16 PM | Comments (6)
Categories: 2004 Governor's Race

"No, Attorney General, this isn’t ‘golf’ "

Press release from the Governor's office:

With so many disenfranchised military voters, how can this be a fair election?
Bellevue, WA – Today Dino Rossi stood with the family of a disenfranchised Marine from Snohomish County to again call for a revote in the governor’s race.
Tyler Farmer is a Marine serving in Iraq, who was recently wounded in Fallujah. He is registered to vote in Snohomish County, and went to extraordinary lengths to make sure he’d be able to vote, but he didn’t receive his ballot until after Election Day. His parents, Charles and Marty Farmer, and his brother, Dylan Farmer, today questioned the fairness of the election process.
“I’d like to ask Christine Gregoire how she can take office in good conscience when so many of our Armed Forces, including my son, weren’t allowed to vote,” said Charles. “The rules were changed for some people in King County, but not for everyone else. That’s wrong.”
Rossi said the election is such a mess that at this point the best solution is a revote. He said his office is receiving a steady stream of calls and e-mails from members of the military, or their loved ones, who never got their ballots or received them too late.
Rossi’s spokeswoman Mary Lane said Gregoire’s remark about the election not being “golf” and that there are “no do-overs” isn’t a sufficient answer to people like Tyler Farmer.
“Christine Gregoire is trying to sweep this election mess under the carpet because she doesn’t want to face up to all the wrongfully disenfranchised people across Washington,” said Lane. “But people like Tyler Farmer, and all the other servicemen and women who were denied their right to vote, aren’t going away. And the fact that this entire election process has been a complete mess isn’t going away, either.
“We need a revote because the people of Washington deserve to have a governor who actually wins an election fair and square.”

As for the cost of a revote: a Gregoire term would be a lot more expensive.

Posted by Brian Crouch at 08:58 PM | Comments (8)
Categories: 2004 Governor's Race

See this:

Does Your Vote Really Count?

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excerpted:

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Daley Delivery?

The 1960 presidential contest between Democrat John F. Kennedy and Republican Richard M. Nixon also raised the specter of vote fraud in the key states of Illinois (27 electoral votes) and Texas (24 votes), both of which JFK is said to have narrowly won. Kennedy bested Nixon in the nationwide popular vote by a razor-thin margin of 118,574 (out of more than 68.8 million cast). In the all-important Electoral College, he received 303 votes to Nixon's 219, with 269 required to win. Had Nixon carried both Illinois and Texas, he would have eked out a 270-vote Electoral College victory. Sabato and Simpson write, "Strong suspicions exist that the Illinois electoral votes were stolen for Kennedy by Mayor Richard J. Daley, who late on election night magically produced just enough of a massive margin in Chicago to overcome Nixon's large lead in the rest of the state." That 319,000-vote advantage in Chicago enabled Kennedy to win statewide by a vote of 8,858 out of more than 4.7 million cast. Likewise, in Texas "substantial voter fraud may well have occurred, though it is impossible to say whether fraud accounted for Kennedy's entire 46,242-vote majority out of over 2.3 million votes cast."

A dozen years earlier, Texas was the venue for one of the most notorious election "steals" in U.S. history. The 1948 Democratic Senate primary run-off pitted Congressman Lyndon B. Johnson, a devotee of the socialistic New Deal agenda, against former Governor Coke R. Stevenson, a staunch conservative and student of the Constitution. The sordid details of the election were chronicled by historian J. Evetts Haley in his best-selling critical biography of the 36th President, A Texan Looks At Lyndon (1964).

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