Election went well, Demos contend

WENATCHEE – Democratic attorneys continued to make the case Wednesday that last November’s ultra-close election went – by and large – pretty well.

A key witness was the man who’s spent months in the middle of the election’s political maelstrom: Dean Logan, who oversees King County’s election system.

In the wake of Gov. Christine Gregoire’s 129-vote victory over Republican candidate Dino Rossi, Republicans have pointed to a host of errors in King County as support for their call for a new election.

“King County was so screwed up that no one but God can know with certitude who won this election,” said Republican attorney Mark Braden.

Among those mistakes:

“At least 348 provisional ballots, according to Logan, were improperly fed into vote-counting machines at polling places, without first being checked for validity.

“Some 96 absentee ballots were found after the final count, including one found just two weeks ago.

“Another 22 uncounted ballots were discovered in voting machines after the election.

“It’s not OK to lose ballots, is it?” GOP attorney Rob Maguire asked Logan.

“Nope,” said Logan.

“It’s not OK to lose track of absentee ballots, is it?” Maguire said.

“Nope,” said Logan.

“It’s not OK to count provisional ballots in the Accuvote machine that haven’t been verified, is it?” Maguire said.

“No,” said Logan.

But Logan also described a county election system – one of the largest in the nation – that was simultaneously struggling with increasingly complex rules and a huge number of ballots.

The county’s aging elections mainframe computer had been replaced less than a year earlier. Registrations were surging with the interest in the presidential race, with more than 140,000 new voters signing up last year. More than 640,000 absentee ballots were mailed out, and more than 540 polling stations set up. Hundreds of partisan observers flocked to polling places and counting spots.

With all the different combinations of elected officials and local issues, there were more than 2,200 different versions of the ballot in King County, Logan said. And with the county’s large Asian population, everything had to be printed in both English and Chinese.

“Everything about this election was record-setting,” Logan said.

Logan had taken over the department just a year earlier, in September 2003. His previous job: state elections director.

King County’s election system had long been troubled, with high-profile gaffes – late ballots, found ballots – that had drawn criticism. When he arrived, Logan said, the system was in turmoil, with a “culture of problems,” lack of communication and an unwillingness among staff to take responsibility for their errors.

When asked why he took the job, Logan said he likes fixing things. “I have always been attracted toward the challenge of working toward public trust and confidence in the election system,” he said.

Even Judge John Bridges, however, seemed frustrated at King County’s ongoing election problems.

“When I was in the Army, I think the phrase was taking names and…kicking tush. Is there any sense of urgency in King County about fixing some of these problems?” the judge asked Logan.

Logan said he has ordered an investigation into the handling of absentee ballots. King County Executive Ron Sims has set up an elections task force to examine the system. And the King County Council is hiring an outside auditor to review things.

Such studies have been done before. Maguire pointed to a May 2004 report from the “King County Citizens Election Oversight Committee,” which recommended – among other things – that the county consider color-coding provisional ballots in case they were improperly fed into the tabulating machines.

“King County did not color-code the ballots though, did they?” Maguire asked.

“There certainly was discussion of that issue and has continued to be,” Logan said. But he added that the change is not as simple “as running down to Kinko’s and copying ballots onto pink paper.” The change would have required more training for poll workers, he said, and any added complexity might have raised the potential for human errors. It was felt, he said, that there was “too high of a risk factor to make that complex a change in our process.”

Democrats also called Wednesday on a University of Washington professor, who sharply criticized Republicans’ strategy for predicting how certain voters voted. Republicans maintain that there were more than 2,000 illegal votes, including votes by felons and dead people. Many of those votes were in counties that leaned heavily toward Gregoire, so Republicans maintain that many of those votes – at least 129, certainly – must have been for Gregoire. They want the alleged illegal votes deducted from the totals in the same proportion as other votes in the precinct.

But UW professor Christopher Adolph said that Republicans’ theory of “proportional deduction” is wrong. The GOP is assuming that the alleged illegal voters voted in the same proportions as the overall precinct. But how everyone else voted, he said, doesn’t prove how one individual voted.

“They (the alleged illegal voters) could have all voted for Rossi, they could have all voted for Gregoire. We simply don’t know,” Adolph said.

Braden, one of the GOP’s attorneys on the case, said “proportional deduction” has been used in other races.

“Their (Democrats’) position is that you can’t do anything,” he said. “Well, we think the law requires you to do something.”