Election trial continues

WENATCHEE – Washington Republicans painted a picture Tuesday of two different ways the 2004 election was run.

One was the efficient and well-managed way in Chelan County, personified by its auditor, Evelyn Arnold.

In Chelan County, she said, every absentee ballot is counted by hand, and a single lost ballot can be detected in the accounting system and located by a hand search.

“We want to make sure that all our numbers match,” said Arnold, who has held the job for 15 years.

The other way was the system in King County, which lawyers for the state GOP have described as rife with “bungling bureaucrats.”

They tried to personify that system through Elections Superintendent Bill Huennekens, who was asked about felons who voted, provisional ballots that were improperly cast at poll sites and vote tallies that don’t match.

“I don’t think it’s conceivable to have everything work perfectly,” said Huennekens, who is in his second year in the post.

“Irregularities happen … people are people, and they make mistakes.”

Republicans are trying to convince Chelan County Superior Court Judge John Bridges that so many irregularities happened and illegal votes were cast that the results of the governor’s race should be thrown out and a new election called.

In the closest statewide race in Washington history, Republican Dino Rossi won the first tally of votes after the election and a machine recount, but Democrat Christine Gregoire came out on top of a hand recount by 129 votes and was sworn in as governor in January.

Republicans contend that without the mistakes, Rossi would have had the highest total. Democrats contend that whatever errors occurred are common to all elections, and if the mistakes are considered statewide, not just in a few Puget Sound counties, Gregoire would have finished with the most votes.

Arnold, who has been in office for 15 years, said Chelan County has both “human checks and computer checks” of its ballots.

“We make sure no voter can vote twice,” she said, adding that she’s never had a situation in which there were more ballots cast than voters who were credited with casting them.

But under cross-examination from Jenny Durkan, an attorney for the state Democratic Party, Arnold said that while her computer system was similar to King County’s, the scale of the election is far different.

Chelan County has slightly more than 29,000 ballots, mostly voted by mail, and only seven poll sites. King County has more than 900,000 voters and more than 500 poll sites. The more poll sites a county has, the more potential for problems, Arnold agreed.

Even in a county with a small population like Chelan, elections officials had no way of knowing when some felons had registered to vote even though they did not have their rights restored, she added.

“The system’s just not in place for us to check that” when they register, Arnold said. “It’s an honor system when people come in and register to vote.”

Eight felons voted in Chelan County last November, she later discovered.

Huennekens also said his workers have few ways of checking whether someone who registers has a felony conviction. After the election, his office investigated records and found about 500 felons were illegally registered to vote.

But like Arnold, he said he doesn’t know how many of them marked their ballots in the governor’s election, or which candidate they picked if they did vote for governor.

Since the election, his office has also discovered that some people voted twice and that a few ballots were cast in the names of voters who died before the election. Unlike Chelan County, his office was not able to “count every single one” of the absentees it received.

King County elections workers have conducted several studies of problems surrounding absentee ballots and provisional ballots. The latter are given to voters who come to a poll site where they are not registered; they are only supposed to be counted later if elections workers can verify voters’ signatures. But several hundred of King County’s 30,000 provisional ballots were fed directly into poll site vote counters without being checked.

Many of those later turned out to be from voters who were, in fact, registered, Huennekens said. But others likely were not from registered voters, which meant “in some cases” illegal ballots were likely counted.

Many Washington counties had more provisional ballots than ever before because of a new federal push to help Americans vote, he said. While Huennekens said he personally conducted training of poll site workers on how to process those ballots, mistakes were made.

“It’s a human-intense process, and humans are not infallible,” he said.

Tuesday morning’s session started with a procedural win for Republicans when Bridges ruled the GOP can present evidence on hundreds of ballots just recently identified in King and Pierce counties that might not have been properly cast.

Democrats had argued the GOP had to identify all the voters they wanted to challenge by mid-April under one of Bridges’ previous rulings, and by the middle of last week under state law.

Bridges said the claims about the problems with the ballots weren’t new, and the GOP couldn’t help that some ballots didn’t come to their attention until recent depositions were taken.

“But I’m not in a position to determine yet that these are illegal votes,” Bridges said.