2,107,370 votes later, only 1 under suspicion

Remember all the aspersions cast on Washington state’s voters after the 2004 gubernatorial election? All the hand-wringing about people voting twice to stuff the ballot box, and dead people and felons casting ballots?

With those images being kept fresh in voters’ minds by angry state Republicans ever since, it may surprise folks to learn that potential voter fraud in the November election was – at most – a one in 2 million chance.

That figure is contained in the secretary of state’s latest update of the state’s voter rolls.

After 2004, the Legislature ordered more scrubbings of voter registration. By cross-referencing computer databases, the counties and the state have been able to bounce dead people and felons from the rolls more efficiently.

Through that computer scrubbing last year, 40,105 voters who passed on to their great rewards had their registrations canceled, Secretary of State Sam Reed reported last week. An additional 39,814 were eliminated when they moved from one county to another, signed up at the new address and forgot to cancel their old registration. Also, 4,500 felons were removed from the rolls after they’d been convicted or incarcerated.

But even with all this careful screening, local and state elections officials still wound up with 61 pairs of votes cast in November that they thought might have been cases of somebody voting twice. In other words, they had that many pairs of ballots in which there was a John J. Doe who had the same birthday and the same address or some other matching information.

So they investigated. They cleared 56 pairs of ballots right away by determining that they were in fact cast by two different people. One was chalked up to a clerical error, where someone who had moved to another county was credited with voting at his old residence, but actually didn’t. Three others turned out, on further investigation, to be voters who do have the same name and birthday but are different people.

That left one case of someone who may have voted twice. It was turned over to the King County prosecutor and might – repeat might – result in prosecution. More investigation is required.

So at most, there was one case of double voting out of 2,107,370 ballots cast.

Reed said he was “pleasantly surprised” with the results. The state is doing a better job of cleaning its voter records but, he added, “we really don’t have a history of voter fraud here.”

That may come as a huge shock to some of his Republican brethren, who still hope to run Dino Rossi in a gubernatorial grudge match against Chris Gregoire to win the seat that was “stolen” from him. It also might give pause to some of their pollsters, who seem to delight in reporting that when people are asked if they have confidence that the problems of the 2004 elections have been cleared up, those people tend to say, “Nope.”

On the eve of last November’s election, one polling firm said its latest survey showed 71 percent of voters surveyed lacked confidence there would be no problems in 2006.

Of course, if some folks keep insisting there are problems, even if they don’t provide any proof, other folks might start figuring those problems are out there.

Registered for trouble

Later in the week, some 1,800 voter registrations that had been submitted in King County were said to be under investigation by local elections officials and prosecutors. These are the same registrations that were kept out of the November election because they missed the deadline by a day. A challenge was threatened because they had been dropped off at United Parcel Service within the deadline, but state law requires a postmark, not a UPS receipt.

The box of registrations wasn’t opened until December, and when they were, elections workers noticed definite similarities between handwriting and signatures. Further checking revealed many phone numbers were wrong.

Responding to an online version of the above item, Tom McCabe, executive vice president for the Building Industry Association of Washington, said that looks like proof of voting problems to him.

But it might also be seen as proof the safeguards actually work. Even if these registrations had arrived on time and been entered, anyone seeking to vote would have had to show up with a valid ID with an address that matched the registration before casting a ballot at the polls. Voting by mail would have been a problem, because many of the addresses appear not to be valid, so ballots would never have been delivered.

It’s clear, however, that the Seattle Association of Community Organization for Reform Now, which turned in these registrations, has some ‘splaining to do.