Residents request state oversight of Whitman County auditor’s office
The latest of a series of mistakes by the Whitman County auditor’s office may just be the straw that broke the camel’s back, judging by a letter signed by at least 45 Whitman County residents to the Washington Secretary of State that requests state oversight of Auditor Eunice Coker’s office during the upcoming election and beyond.
Last week it was discovered that Coker’s office had mailed more than 800 Ward 1 Pullman ballots to Ward 3 voters who are not eligible to vote in the Ward 1 election. Ward 1 features a race between incumbent Councilor Al Sorensen and challengers Hannah Krauss, who dropped out of the race via social media but still appears on the ballot, and Eric Fejeran. There is not a City Council race in Ward 3.
The mistake marks the third consecutive year in which City Council elections have been plagued by errors.
“It’s disgraceful,” said Pullman resident and former Pullman School Board director candidate Elizabeth Siler, who wrote the letter. “We have a serious issue with an auditor’s office that seems unable to run an election.”
Coker has said the error, which the county says was the result of recent changes in the boundaries that make up Pullman’s wards, will be corrected as ballots are returned. The plan is to set aside the incorrect ballots, ignore the votes for candidates in the wrong ward, copy the correct information onto new ballots and count them.
“We wonder how she will manage this intricate process since she could not manage the much simpler process of just getting the right ballot out to the right people,” Siler, who dropped out of the Pullman School District race via social media, wrote in the letter.
The letter calls for oversight of Aug. 1 ballot counting as well as ballot preparation supervision and oversight in the final four weeks before the November election and 2018 primaries and elections.
“This is not a Democrat versus Republican issue,” Siler said. “This affects every voter. We have got to get better election management.”
This is something Mount Vernon resident Cynthia Hosick agrees with. Hosick, who moved from Whitman County to Skagit County in June, said she had changed her voter registration upon making the cross-state move, and so she was surprised to find a Whitman County ballot addressed to her new address in her mailbox. Not only did the Skagit County resident get a ballot for a county she no longer lived in, she received the wrong ballot for her former address in Whitman County.
“I lived in Ward 1, I got the ballot for Ward 3,” she said.
“Honest to Pete, I don’t know why they don’t have some turnover in that office.”
Upon making some calls to the Auditor’s Office, Hosick said she discovered the election office obtains a list of address changes from the post office and sends ballots to those new addresses – even if they are no longer in the county.
Hosick said she wonders if the next of kin of deceased Pullman residents are also receiving ballots.
“It seems a little peculiar to me,” Hosick said. “It shouldn’t be that way.”
Siler noted in her letter that the recent incident was not an isolated event and she counted six ballot errors in the past four years.
In October 2015, the Elections Office noted the Hospital District 3 race was missing from ballots, and a few days later had to resend more than 700 ballots to Pullman voter because Ward 1 ballots were sent to Ward 3 residents.
February 2016 brought another round of trouble, after about two dozen Oakesdale residents were sent Tekoa ballots, followed two months later with an incorrect proposition printed on almost 300 ballots mailed to four precincts.
Similar issues occurred in 2013, according to Daily News archives.
In April 2016, a Secretary of State Office’s 2015 General Election Review examining 74 election procedures and processes found 20 violations in the previous five years, ranging from prematurely printing election results to incorrectly characterizing Pullman City Hall as a voting center to the security of ballots being jeopardized.