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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: KLP who wrote (96190)	1/21/2005 5:41:37 PM
From: Neeka	Respond to of 793926

Sharkansky hit upon something like that in his blog. The GOP isn't going to let any county sweep the issue under the rug especially if they can get some cooperation from the court. M What are the Vote Counters afraid of? Various county auditors, including Snohomish Auditor Bob Terwilliger, have filed papers to dismiss the Rossi election challenge. Here's my speculation on the underlying motivations -- 1) Some of these auditors, like Terwilliger, are Democrats and simply want Gregoire's "victory" to go unchallenged. 2) A new election would come out of the auditors' budgets. 3) Most importantly, I imagine, the litigation would shine light on the various errors, irregularities and inadequacies in the auditors' operations. I suspect some of these auditors would be embarrassed out of their jobs if it were shown how sloppily they ran their departments. For example, Snohomish County has never been able to produce a correct list of the voters who actually voted on Nov. 2. The Snohomish Elections office acknowledged to me in a recent e-mail that they counted 282 more ballots than voters (158 mystery provisionals, and 124 mystery absentee ballots). Depending on what lies behind these summary numbers, the true discrepancy could even be larger. I'm waiting on answers to some follow-up questions. Elections director Carolyn Diepenbrock now claims in a court filing arguing against expedited discovery that she has never adequately investigated the source of these discrepancies: Interrogatory No. 4 requests a list of precincts in which more voters received credit for voting than the number of ballots counted from those precincts. Snohomish County does not have this data available in a computer report format nor can it electronically create a report with available data. To produce this list, elections staff must run an individual computer report for each precinct and its portions (approximately 1000 reports), which would identify the number of voters in a precinct portion who received credit for voting, tabulate the numbers in the precinct portions for a precinct total and then manually compare those numbers to the canvas for the November 2, 2004 election. This is a labor intensive, manual project that will take more time to perform than is available prior to January 21, 2005. It's astonishing to me that Snohomish County certified the election without having done this. I can see why the Snohomish Auditor might not want anybody to , uh, audit his department. Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at 12:06 PM \| Comments (48)