| Submit your comments on this article |
| Home Front: Politix |
| Count every vote - EFF's evaluation of the WA state election. |
| 2005-03-04 |
| Link goes to Michelle Malkin (hat tip!) where she has a link to the actual PDF document. Exerpts: Please excuse the formatting it was cut-and-pasted from an Acrobat file. The following items were clear violations of Washington state law: On nine occasions, King County elections officials discovered unsecured ballots and added them to the total count. 37 provisional ballots (ballots that by law must be checked to see if the registration is valid) were counted without first being verified. 17 In King County, at least 348 provisional ballots were fed directly into the vote-counting machine. In Pierce County, 77 provisional ballots were counted at the polling places without verification in violation of state law. In Stevens County, approximately 12 provisional ballots were cast by individuals who were not eligible to vote (nine because they had never registered to vote and three because their registrations had been cancelled).18 On estimated 3,500 duplicate absentee ballots were mailed to voters. After the error was discovered, King County advised the voters to vote on one ballot and discard the other.19 At least 1,108 convicted felons, whose voting rights had not been restored, voted. At least 45 dead people voted. At least 15 people voted twice At least 30 federal write-in ballots with a straight party line vote were not counted in the governor's race in King County. Eghty-nine voters voted in King County whose registration date on the King County voter files was after the deadline for registering to vote. However, their voter registration deadline was changed to a date before the deadline sometime between December 29, 2004, and January 11, 2005. King County explained this as a human error. A 100 percent check of the actual voter registration should be made. This can only be done during "discovery" in a lawsuit. A "no" ballot was counted as a vote for Gregoire. A "Christine Rossi" ballot was counted as a vote for Gregoire. 55,177 ballots were "enhanced," and 4,962 were duplicated in King County.24 Virtually no procedures were used to verify whether a person who voted was actually eligible to vote. When the Secretary of State certified the election on December 30, at least 8,419 more votes were counted in five counties than the number of voters who had cast votes. The law says there must be a legal voter for every vote counted. In King County alone,5,845 more ballots were cast than voters in 1,318 precincts. In 1,011 precincts, 3,751 more voters were tallied than ballots. This brings the total discrepancies to 9,596 in 2,329 precincts.25 These reconciliation errors raise serious questions as to how the county canvassing boards could certify the election as a "full, true, and correct representation of the votes cast in the county." The Secretary of State issued administrative rules (WACs) on residency which allowed homeless individuals to claim the King County Elections Office as their residence in violation of state law and the Constitution. In some counties, the names and addresses of voters who cast provisional ballots were released to political parties. Political workers sought out these provisional voters and asked them for signatures to validate already-cast ballots, but only if the voter had chosen that political party's candidate. This violates federal and state law as well as the State Constitution. Yet the Secretary of State said nothing, even though, in 2002, he wrote a letter to The Olympian stating that election officials could not contact voters on questionable ballots. "No such mechanism exists to do so in state law, and were it to exist, it would be in violation of the constitutional rights of Washington state's voters." King County elections officials failed to maintain security of both valid ballots and unused ballots. Up to 14 King County employees had access to the vault where the unused ballots were stored. In at least one precinct, tallies during the recount process were significantly different than the actual count in the precinct on election night. Gregoire votes had gone up and Rossi votes had gone down. Absentee ballots had been mixed with precinct ballots, and the audit trail was lost. Untested election software (not tested to federal standards) was used in the November 2004 election in Chelan, King, Kitsap, Klickitat, Pierce, Snohomish and Yakima counties. Thousands of military ballots were not received back in time to be counted because they were not mailed out on a timely basis. .... Note: King County is a very Democratic County and contains the Peoples Republic of Seattle.... The December ruling of the Washington State Supreme Court allowing King County to recanvass hundreds of ballots was made after every other county in the state had already certified their results. This meant that special rule applied only to King County. Using inconsistent rules like this in various counties violates the equal protection provision of the U.S. Constitution. The equal protection clause ensures that all citizens are treated equally under the law and are guaranteed the right to privacy regarding how they have voted. The same voting privacy protection afforded to citizens under the Washington State Constitution was violated by state election authorities. Article VI, Section 7 of the State Constitution was repeatedly violated by state and local election officials by permitting individuals to vote who did not meet the requirements of the state registration laws. The court approved King County to recanvass 573 disputed ballots; they recanvassed 735! Meanwhile, the Washington State Republican Party presented 275 voter statements to election officials in 19 counties, and all of the counties refused to reopen their certification process. |
| Posted by:CrazyFool |
| #2 If Rossi doesn't press this, he ought to jump into the Senate race against Cantwell. |
| Posted by: eLarson 2005-03-04 8:58:52 PM |
| #1 soundpolitics.com has been all over this as well. |
| Posted by: Dishman 2005-03-04 7:05:11 PM |