Eight votes missed in county

WENATCHEE – Spokane County recently discovered eight absentee ballots from last November’s election that were never opened or counted.

Other counties have other problems, including totals that don’t account for every vote, signatures that weren’t properly checked or ballots that were counted without being verified.

Those problems were highlighted Friday afternoon in the trial in which Republicans seek to overturn the results of the gubernatorial election, as state Democrats began their half of the case.

To counter problems that state Republicans raised earlier this week about King County – the state’s most populous county and the one with the highest margin of victory for Christine Gregoire – Democrats pointed out mistakes in counties that went heavily for Dino Rossi.

“I do consider this to be, yes, an internal office error,” Spokane County Auditor Vicky Dalton said on the witness stand in Chelan County Superior Court.

In a later interview, Dalton said elections workers found eight unopened absentee ballots about three weeks ago, when they were looking for some of the documents Democrats had requested for the trial. While sorting through for envelopes that previously held absentee ballots, Spokane County elections workers found one or two envelopes that hadn’t been opened and still had ballots inside.

Dalton then ordered a search of the 131,000-plus absentee envelopes in the locked storage units, and found a total of eight unopened, and therefore uncounted, ballots. She believes they were missed because high turnout, the heavy level of mail ballots and other pressures didn’t allow time for a final check of envelopes that is usually conducted before the vote count is certified.

Mistakes can happen in any election, Dalton said in court.

“There is absolutely no guarantee that another election wouldn’t have similar or other errors in it,” she said.

State Republicans contend that so many errors – from election worker mistakes to illegal ballots being cast – happened in the 2004 election that there is no way to tell if the 129-vote victory margin for Democrat Gregoire is correct. They want Chelan County Superior Court Judge John Bridges to void those results and order a new election.

Democrats tried to show Friday that mistakes happened all over the state, not just in heavily Democratic King County, and that there was nothing sinister in the 2004 election.

Republicans contend that some provisional ballots were counted in King County without being properly checked. That happened in Stevens and Adams counties, too, where some ballots were placed in the ballot boxes and counted along with properly cast votes, and other provisional ballots didn’t have the voters’ signatures verified in the manner required by state law.

Tim Gray, the Stevens County auditor, said he didn’t know workers were supposed to check the signatures on provisional ballots until he was questioned by a Seattle newspaper reporter. He said they try to avoid errors “as much as humanly possible,” but sometimes they happen.

Other auditors or elections officials said their vote totals don’t always match their counts of voters who get credited for casting a ballot, which is the basis for the GOP claim that there were “more votes than voters,” or ballot-stuffing, in the election.

Clark County Auditor Greg Kimsey said there was a discrepancy between the ballots counted and the voter crediting figures in his county. He said that doesn’t indicate any kind of fraud, and with the growing turnouts, there are more opportunities for discrepancies.

Earlier in the day, Bridges rejected a motion to dismiss the case at the end of the Republicans’ presentation of evidence, saying Washington residents need to know as much as possible about the problems surrounding last year’s governor’s election.

“I think it would be a disservice to (the Republicans) to cut this case off now without requiring both sides to present everything they have,” Bridges said in denying the Democrats’ request.

Harry Korrell, an attorney for the state Republican Party, had argued there was ample evidence of 875 absentee votes in King County that can’t be traced to a voter.

“When you have an election decided by 129 votes, and you have 875 more ballots than voters, you have reason to be exceedingly suspicious,” Korrell said.

There are also felons who registered to vote without having their rights restored and provisional ballots fed through vote counters without being checked by poll workers, and errors that election workers just can’t explain, he said.

Kevin Hamilton, an attorney for the state Democratic Party, had countered that Republicans had not provided “clear and convincing proof” of their allegations of misconduct and illegal voting during four days of testimony.

There were errors that occurred from such things as King County workers being unfamiliar with a new computer system, Hamilton said. But the Republicans did nothing to prove which gubernatorial candidate got those votes. “They could not and they have not proved these errors and illegal votes changed this election,” he said.

Bridges said the case is important to Rossi and Gregoire, important to their supporters, and important to the citizens of Washington. When someone contests the results of an election, they deserve a full hearing, he said.

After all the evidence is in, probably by late next week, Bridges said he will “sift the facts through the law” to come up with a decision.

“Both sides deserve a full and complete analysis on the facts as well as the conclusions of law,” he said.