King Of Them All

Oops. I believe Palm Beach County in Florida just got dethroned as the most perturbed and confused local election board in the country. King County in Washington seems to have jumped the shark; it appears unlikely that anyone can mount a serious challenge to King County's status.

I have been following the Washington story with mild electoral compassion, and until this morning I didn't take seriously any allegation of manipulation. There will always be close elections - I had just figured that it was Washington's turn to suffer. But no - Steven Scharansky at Sound Politics discovered that 3,539 more ballots have been counted in King County than voters. A minor discrepancy, what? Here is the story in the Seattle Times:

King County Elections Director Dean Logan said it is not unusual to find a discrepancy that must be reconciled through a painstaking comparison of computer data and other records after votes are counted. He said that two recounts have meant the county could not do that work as quickly as usual.

But the discrepancy in this election appears to be larger than usual.

"I think historically the data has never been reconciled 100 percent between ballots cast and the voters given credit for voting," Logan said. "I think 3,500 is higher than what I'm comfortable with. ... I would be less concerned if we were in the range of 1,000 or 1,200."

Ah - and what would account for the discrepancy?

Logan explained part of the discrepancy by saying the voter list doesn't include two categories of voters: domestic-violence victims whose addresses are confidential and military or overseas voters who cast ballots under special rules. He estimated the number of those votes at between 100 and 200 for each category.

Well, I pulled off my shoes and counted carefully on my toes (easier to do when you are blogging in your bathrobe), and that still seems to leave 3,100 more ballots than voters. Dear me. And wasn't it King County that kept finding ballots? Yes, it was. Ah well, such is the life of an election elf. Whether there was any futzing of the results or not is open to question, but certainly King County has an interesting way of handling elections.

150 ballots were found in a warehouse. And previously some 500 improperly rejected ballots had been found. And then during the earlier machine recount, King County had come up with about 10000 ballots that hadn't been counted before:

Rossi led by 261 votes after the first count. Then, during the machine recount, Rossi's lead withered to just 42 votes — largely because King County tallied nearly 1,000 ballots that weren't included in the initial count.

Even earlier, before November 16th, King County suddenly realized it had a lot of extra absentee ballots, and a very high (over 80%) rate of approved provisional ballots - reversing the average ratio. This amounted to about 10,000 more ballots than expected:

The best news for Gregoire yesterday was the announcement that King County expected to have about 10,000 more ballots than previously estimated. Gregoire holds a strong lead in King County.

and:

Early yesterday, King County projected it had 11,000 ballots left to count. By the afternoon, they'd boosted that projection to 21,000. Logan said the county had underestimated how many voters would return their absentee ballots (which now looks to be 87 percent or 88 percent, he said) and how many provisional ballots would be approved (now looking like 84 percent)(emphasis added).

It's hard to see how this mess can ever be straightened out now. Certainly some of the ballots that were found earlier were legitimate. You couldn't throw them out. All I can say is that it's hard indeed to make Georgia elections look like a model of efficiency, so thank you, King County.