County Auditors Take King to Task
Sound Politics
The King County elections office, the Democratic Party, Secretary of State Sam Reed, and the lazy and credulous wing of the local media establishment have been feeding us the pabulum that King County's discrepancy of thousands more ballots than voters is just the way every election is supposed to be managed.
Fortunately, there are others who will tell you the truth.
County auditors are now starting to come forward and state that the huge discrepancy in King County is an anomaly and that there's no good explanation for it.
I had a long conversation this morning with Jefferson County Auditor Donna Eldridge. Ms. Eldridge is in the interesting position of being a three-term elected Republican in a largely Democratic county. Indeed, Jefferson gave Gregoire her second highest margin of any county in the state, after San Juan County, and a tad higher even than King County. But nobody is likely to suspect Ms. Eldridge's office of funny business, because she runs a professional operations and by all indications the number of ballots cast in Jefferson County reconciles with the number of voters who cast them.
Take a look at the number of ballots counted in Jefferson County in the first count: 18,772. In the machine recount? 18,772. In the manual recount? 18,772.
King County, on the other hand, kept finding new pieces of paper every time they unzipped their pants.
How did Jefferson County do it? At every step of the process, Eldridge explained, they reconciled the number of voters with the number of ballots and if there was a discrepancy (such as ballots getting caught in a tabulator) they figured out what happened, fixed the problem, noted the exceptioins and reconciled again.
In the final report they were down to 18,772 ballots counted and 18,760 voters identified. The difference of 12 was attributable to 3 unregistered military voters, 3 Address Confidentiality Program voters, and 6 provisionals that were wrongly dropped into ballot boxes. In the latter cases, there were also 6 empty provisional envelopes from matching precincts, so within the realm of reasonable doubt the 6 empty envelopes (all from eligible voters) could be tied with the 6 improperly commingled provisionals. That's all. At most 6, and probably 0, untraceable ballots. Even when you scale for total number of ballots counted, the equivalent number in King County would be at most 289, as opposed to the actual discrepancy of 2,150.
I asked Eldridge if huge discrepancies as we've seen in King County are typical. She said no, they are not. "This would never happen in our county" she said, adding that she was "blown away" when it first became apparent on Dec. 2 that King County had a big reconciliation problem, that was not yet being reported. She knows of no explanation. County auditors have discussed this issue amongst themselves. While some are inclined to circle the wagons and protect Dean Logan, a number of auditors are quietly uncomfortable with what's going on. Ms. Eldridge is the first (that I know of) to take a strong stand. She helped scuttle what would have been an Orwellian letter by the auditor association in support of Dean Logan.
Eldridge has promised to send me her county's reconciliation reports when she's back in the office after the holiday. This should give us a baseline for how an election should be managed and how the results should be tabulated and reconciled. We'll just have to keep pressing King County to either explain their entire discrepancy with attribution to specific factors, or explain why they can't do as good of a job as, say, Jefferson and other counties.
Posted by Stefan Sharkansky
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