Ballot total best available at time, official says

WENATCHEE – Republicans think there’s something fishy about the absentee ballots cast last November in King County that cost Dino Rossi the governorship, and spent most of Wednesday trying to convince a trial judge to see things their way.

But Democrats attacked the data the GOP wants to use to prove that point, and the Republican political strategist who is trying to present it.

In defending the process that led to Christine Gregoire winning the state’s top executive post, Democrats also did their best to undercut a Republican claim that King County falsified data on the absentee voting.

Under cross-examination, a King County elections official said the official tally of absentee ballots received by the county did turn out to be wrong, but was the best available count in mid-November.

Until some 95 uncounted absentee ballots were found among piles of envelopes this spring, “I didn’t know it was inaccurate,” said Nicole Way, the supervisor of absentee ballots for King County.

The trial involves the Republicans’ challenge of Democrat Gregoire’s victory in the closest statewide election in Washington history. Most of Wednesday’s testimony centered around mail-in ballots in King County, including a discrepancy of 875 more absentee ballots counted by the county’s computer than the number of voters credited with casting an absentee ballot. Republicans say that’s proof of their oft-repeated mantra, “more votes than voters,” and that the results should be invalidated so a new election can be held.

Democrats, however, argue that the system that counts ballots and the system that credits voters with casting a ballot are different, and discrepancies can be explained by simple mistakes rather than illegal manipulation.

Chelan County Superior Court Judge John Bridges has already ruled that whether a voter is credited with casting a ballot is not proof that the person did or didn’t vote, and not an issue in the trial.

Bridges said he will consider some information about those 875 King County absentee ballots – but how much information remains to be seen after Democrats continue cross-examining Republican political strategist Clark Bensen today.

Bensen said he got information about those ballots from elections officials and put them into a spreadsheet that looked at where the discrepancies occurred in the county’s nearly 3,000 precincts.

Gregoire won four of the five precincts that had the greatest number of absentee ballots in excess of the voters credited for voting. Rossi won the six precincts that had the most credited voters above the number of absentee ballots.

Republicans said in their opening statement they had evidence of ballots being “stuffed” in some precincts for Gregoire, and “dumped” in other precincts for Rossi. But Bensen wasn’t allowed to suggest that, and GOP attorney Mark Braden said the political strategist wasn’t acting as an expert to analyze the numbers.

“We don’t need any expert testimony for you to conclude what those numbers mean,” Braden told Bridges.

Democratic attorney David Berman argued that Bensen had connected different data that weren’t necessarily related or as sinister as Republicans have claimed. Berman said he’d present a statistician later to warn against “the tendency of laypeople to jump to a conclusion that is not necessarily valid.”

Bridges said he’d consider the numbers, but not Bensen’s opinions on them. “Whether that has any meaning in the ozone remains to be seen,” the judge added.

Earlier in the day, attorneys dueled over the data given to the King County Canvassing Board about the absentee ballots it received and counted. Because the county switched to a new computerized voter registration and ballot counting system earlier in 2004, some election workers, including Way, were concerned about their ability to keep track of the ballots as they went out and came back.

Keeping track is important, Way said, to make sure each of the county’s 654,000 absentee voters got a ballot, and no one cast more than one ballot. There can be human errors in tracking the ballots from the time they arrive, through the points when signatures are verified, envelopes are opened and votes are tabulated, she said.

In addition, the new system sometimes had problems reading labels with bar codes or accounting for military ballots.

Way said she expressed her concerns and frustrations with King County’s new computer system to her superiors before the September primary and the general election.

When the election was over, the computer system could not tell elections workers the total number of absentee ballots returned, she said. But that was one of the numbers the county Canvassing Board needed before it certified the results to the state.

To come up with that number, Way said her boss, Garth Fell, decided to add two other figures it did have, the number of absentee ballots the computer had accepted and counted, and the number of rejected ballots, which had been counted by hand. That total was given to the Canvassing Board.

Republicans say that created a fictitious number. When GOP attorney Harry Korrell pointed out that election workers found about 95 absentee ballots still in their envelopes in the county’s storage facility in the last two months, Way agreed that those newly found ballots are not reflected in the figure for returned ballots given to the Canvassing Board.

But under cross-examination from Jenny Durkan for the state Democratic Party, Way said the number given to the Canvassing Board came from adding two numbers elections officials believed were correct and agreed that the balloting system had checks and balances at each step.

“You can’t be perfect, right?” Durkan asked.

“Obviously not,” Way answered.

Under intense back-and-forth questioning from both sides, Way said she was concerned about the number when preparing the report because she didn’t have anything from the computer to compare it with. But she denied it was deliberately inaccurate and eventually described it as “the best number we had.”

At one point, Bridges broke in with questions of his own, trying to clear up details of the process and the problems surrounding it.

“Whose idea was it to install this computer program just before the election?” Bridges asked.

Replied Way: “Not mine.”