Security Stiffened For Mail-In Ballots Tampering Probe Shines Spotlight On Increasingly Popular Voting Option

As Spokane County prepares to send out more than 40,000 ballots to the growing portion of the electorate that votes by mail, county officials are still struggling to explain how nearly 5,400 ballots could have been altered last November while in a courthouse vault.

County Auditor Vicky Dalton said the elections staff is increasing security for mail-in ballots, adding locks and restricting access to the cramped quarters where the computer punch cards are sorted and cleaned.

The Spokane County Sheriff’s Office has begun an investigation into possible ballot tampering. But three weeks after a detective was called in, department spokesman Cpl. Dave Reagan said there was “nothing substantive to report.”

With no suspect and no conclusive theory on how the tampering occurred, elections officials must hope the new safeguards will protect this fall’s mail-in ballots.

The number of voters who cast ballots by mail continues to climb around the state.

Washington law allows voters to request permanent absentee status, rather than requesting a mail-in ballot for each election. Political parties now urge their most solid voting blocs, particularly seniors, to sign up for permanent absentee ballots. Some voters just like the convenience of voting at home rather than making a trip to the precinct house on Election Day.

The law also allows counties to conduct their elections entirely by mail, and Ferry County has traded the mailbox for the ballot box.

Counties can also designate precincts with fewer than 200 voters to vote by mail rather than at a polling station. Spokane has 19 such precincts.

Overall, the number of requests for mail-in ballots this year in Spokane County is up 10 percent over 1999, to about 40,000.

Absentee voters were once considered more conservative and more Republican than the electorate as a whole. But in recent elections the difference between votes cast at the polls and those cast by mail has been slight.

Which makes Spokane County’s results last November for Initiative 695, the $30 license tab law, all the more suspicious.

Of the 94,635 county voters who went to the polls last Nov. 2, 53,174 voted yes and 40,874 voted no - about the same proportion as the state overall. Another 468 apparently couldn’t make up their minds, and didn’t punch either option, while 119 punched both yes and no.

When a voter punches nothing, it’s called an undervote; punch more than one hole, it’s an overvote. Neither is included in the final results for that ballot item. At one-tenth of 1 percent, the level of overvoting for ballots cast at Spokane precinct stations, was within the standard range for any ballot issue.

But for the 29,615 ballots that were cast by mail in Spokane County - either by absentee voters or from vote-by-mail precincts - the results were markedly different.

Mail-in ballots tallied 16,792 yes, 7,143 no, and 281 undervotes; but 5,399 - or 18 percent of the total cast - were overvotes.

That level of double-punched ballots is so startling that elections supervisors from the Secretary of State’s Office and Dalton now say the only likely explanation is that someone tampered with the ballots between the time they arrived at the courthouse and were processed by the computer card reader.

As in past years, last November’s mail-in ballots were stored and processed in a vault on the second floor of the courthouse.

They were locked and sealed in wooden cabinets at night, when the vault door with its old tumbler combination was also shut and locked.

But during the day, neither the cabinet nor the vault was locked. Ballots that had been sorted for various voting districts were kept in stacks in unlocked metal boxes in the wooden cabinets, which are about 10 feet inside the vault door.

County employees, as well as members of the public, had access to the vault.

And the vault has numerous nooks and crannies, hiding places behind stacks of leather-bound ledgers and rows of filing cabinets, where a person could stay beyond the sight of anyone else in the room, Dalton concedes. There are no cameras monitoring activity in the vault.

People who have worked for years processing the county’s ballots find it hard to believe anyone could have tampered with the ballots.

“It blows my mind to think anyone could have done this,” said Juli Boone, supervisor of absentee balloting. “We always thought people working together was a safeguard.”

Boone is sure that the cabinet and vault were locked every night, and several elections workers were always in the vault during the day.

Dalton said that while she has faith in Boone’s integrity, there’s no guarantee the ballots weren’t left unlocked and unguarded at some point.

“All it takes is one person in there alone, and that’s one thing we can’t say didn’t happen,” Dalton said.

Spokane County’s mail-in ballots are opened, sorted and cleaned by temporary workers supplied by employment agencies. Last November, the county hired some two dozen such workers to handle various phases of the absentee process.

One of those workers, Annette Bollaert, said part of her job after the election was to clean the ballots of any small squares, called chad, that weren’t punched completely off the cards. She and other workers began noticing that a large number of ballots that had to be cleaned had both the yes and the no punched for I-695.

“Some of them were punched clear through but a lot of them (had chad) hanging,” Bollaert recalled. “We tried to come up with some kind of reason.”

The workers studied the ballot question for I-695: “Shall voter approval be required for any tax increase, license tab fees be $30 per year for motor vehicles and existing vehicle taxes be repealed?”

They came up with a theory that some voters must have supported one part of the initiative and opposed another part, and punched both options.

“It was almost as if people weren’t quite sure,” Bollaert said.

County elections officials, including longtime Superintendent Tom Wilbur, offered a similar explanation in the days after the election.

But no other county reported comparable numbers of overvotes on I-695.

Snohomish County had 36 over-votes on I-695 out of 180,000 cast. Stevens County had 17 overvotes out of 13,700 cast.

The double-punched ballots were so odd that election workers were still talking about them two weeks later, while they were hand counting the city ballots for the city of Spokane’s strong mayor initiative, which passed by a razor-thin margin of 29 votes, Boone said. Election workers did not notice an unusual number of double punches on that issue, she said.

But it wasn’t until last month, when state elections supervisors were checking vote totals from every county, that anyone mentioned the possibility of ballot tampering. Some of Spokane’s vote-by-mail precincts had zero “no” votes on I-695, and dozens of overvotes. Certain groupings of absentee ballots - those that would have been separated and put into those unlocked metal boxes that sat in the unlocked wooden cabinet - also had lower than normal “no” votes, and very high numbers of overvotes.

By then, the ballots had been recycled, which is standard county policy for off-year elections.

One theory is that certain batches of mail-in ballots were altered while they were awaiting processing. A person with a sharp, thin implement could have punched through the “yes” squares on a stack of ballots. That would not alter “yes” votes, void the “no” votes by turning them into overvotes, and turn the unpunched ballots into “yes” votes.

But what elections officials can’t explain is a motive. Computer runs from last fall’s elections show that only half of the overvotes were recorded on mail-in ballots that were counted on Election Day, when the county tabulates any absentee and vote-by-mail ballot it has received and processed by that afternoon.

The other half were counted after Election Day. By then, I-695 had passed overwhelmingly, and there was no need to alter ballots to tip the balance in favor of the initiative.

“It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense,” Dalton said. “Unless it’s like people who have lots of money, but shoplift. Maybe they just wanted to see if they could get away with it.”

Although Dalton requested an investigation in early August, the sheriff’s detective investigating possible ballot tampering had not, as of late last week, questioned elections officials about the way mail-in ballots are handled or questioned workers.

Department spokesman Reagan said it was too early to be interviewing witnesses because the detective was still gathering evidence. The investigation was proceeding “at a normal pace,” he said.

“We can’t be driven by a deadline for new ballots coming out,” Reagan said. “We have to be driven by conducting a competent investigation.”

Without a suspect or a conclusive theory on how the ballots were altered, Dalton said she is taking steps to improve security and give voters confidence that the absentee ballots they receive this week will be safe after being returned.

The ballots will be sorted and stored in metal boxes, which will be locked. Those boxes will be stored in an inner vault, with a new lock, in a cabinet that will also be locked. The county is also hiring an additional supervisor, who will oversee ballot processing whenever Boone is out of the vault. No one will enter the vault without authorization and an escort.

But the ballot tampering has Dalton and other election workers stunned.

“What puts them apart from the rest of the citizens, to change someone else’s vote? Morally and emotionally, how can they do that?” Dalton said.

This sidebar appeared with the story: PRIMARY ELECTION Ballots available

Absentee ballots will be available from elections offices in Washington state starting Wednesday, and can be requested until the day before the Sept. 19 primary election.

The deadline for registering to vote at the polls has already passed for the primary, but Washington residents can still register to vote by absentee ballot. To do that, you must register in person at the county Elections Office by Friday.

In Spokane County, the Elections Office is on the second floor of the County Courthouse.

A new voter can request permanent absentee status, or vote at the polls in subsequent elections.

Double-punched ballots The changing way people vote