Posted on 01/10/2005 2:03:19 PM PST by swilhelm73
Gov.-elect Christine Gregoire would be wise not to break out the champagne just yet. Until a few days ago, Republicans appeared to have little cause to contest the hand recount of ballots cast in the governor’s race, which gave Gregoire a 129-vote victory margin over Dino Rossi.
But Rossi and his supporters now appear to have come up with enough evidence of election irregularities to throw Gregoire’s microscopic lead into doubt. Just as Gregoire was within her rights to insist on that hand recount, Rossi is within his rights, under state law, to contest its results in court. He did so Friday, announcing a challenge that conceivably could lead to the annulment of the vote.
This election has been marred by serious mistakes, several of which have arisen from what appears to be sheer sloppiness in King County’s election department. The county has repeatedly turned up large batches of ballots that should have been counted but weren’t. Now the issue is ballots that were counted but perhaps shouldn’t have been.
Republicans and the Building Industry Association of Washington – a key Rossi ally – have been poring over election records and pointing to what they say are illegal votes, including ballots cast by felons or in the name of deceased citizens.
It’s hard at this point to judge the magnitude of those problems. But another mistake – the counting of unscreened provisional ballots in King County – appears to justify the court review Rossi is seeking. It could prove fatal to Gregoire’s precariously slim margin.
Provisional ballots are given to would-be voters whose registration cannot be immediately verified by poll workers. They are supposed to be sequestered until election officials can confirm that the people in question are in fact entitled to vote.
But at several polling places in King County, people who’d been given provisional ballots were allowed – accidentally, we hope – to feed them into vote-counting machines without the required screening. Once through the machines, the provisional ballots cannot be retrieved or distinguished from the ordinary ballots.
A few dozen might not have made a difference. But Dean Logan, King County’s elections chief, acknowledged last week that as many as 350 provisional ballots could have been counted by error.
It may be true, as Logan said, that most of these ballots – if checked – would have been found to be valid. But they weren’t c hecked. And there’s no reason to assume that people who might have deliberately bypassed the verification process were legitimate voters. Given the wispiness of Gregoire’s margin, Rossi can’t be faulted for asking the judiciary to take a hard look at these problems.
His challenge may not change the outcome, but it should give the Legislature extra incentive to do what it can to prevent such irregularities in future elections
Or worse. Over at Sound Politics:
Omerta breaks
The King County Elections staff are starting to break "omerta" and talk about some of the monkey business that's going on in their deparment. In the extended entry is an anonymous e-mail from someone claiming to be a King County elections worker that was sent to the Rossi campaign on the morning of Nov. 17 [it was later that day when the first count was completed]. Some of the hints in here have been confirmed by later events. Notice in particular the questions about the sending of military ballots and the tie-in to today's Seattle Times article and the mysterious update to the King County "fact sheet". I just obtained this e-mail today. You would be correct to be skeptical of any such bombshell revelations from an anonymous source passed along by a political campaign. All I can say is that I'm getting a number of e-mails and blog comments from different people who are longtime observers of the KC elections department. Some of these tipsters are anonymous. Others give their names and provide corroborating details with each other, with the anonymous ones and with independent sources. I'd be surprised, frankly, if every single detail in all of these tips will ultimately be proven true. But I'm willing to wager that some of what's alleged here will be proven true. Enough that not only will the election be set aside, but that some major figures in King County government will be taken out. [...]
But at several polling places in King County, people who’d been given provisional ballots were allowed – accidentally, we hope – to feed them into vote-counting machines without the required screening. Once through the machines, the provisional ballots cannot be retrieved or distinguished from the ordinary ballots.
OK, i worked the election at the polls, and we were supposed to watch them put the ballots into the machine- i have to say one person stuffed their whole provisonal ballot in the machine and it got stuck, we managed to get it out and everything worked out, but what the hell? When we gave out a provisional ballot, there was tons of other work to do- for example, the voter had to write out a whole bunch of stuff, and then they had to place their ballot into an envelope.
I equate this to the Olympic Basketball loss of the US Team to the Soviets in 1972. The judges were going to give them as many chances as it took for them to get the outcome that they wanted. In both cases, the bad guys won.
Why don't they use a different colored paper for the provisional ballots?
On KVI Talk Radio in Seattle, a woman called Kirby Wilbur one morning last week and asked a simple question: "Why aren't "provisional ballots" a different color paper? Then you could immediately tell if a provisional ballot had been placed into the machine." Good question, I think, and a simple solution to this never being a problem again.
Well, why would the left want to make provisional ballots easier to identify from other ballots? The whole idea is to make it easier for local officials to count the former whether or not they are legitmate ballots or not?
One of the big problems the Reps face is that the Dems fight them tooth and nail on any real voter fraud reforms.
"Why don't they use a different colored paper for the provisional ballots?"
Simple. If they used different colored paper for the provisional ballots, they could tell which ballots are provisional and could be checked. Don't you folks in Virgina know anything about cheating? (big smile)
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