Here is yet another fascinating detail about the 561 573 595 735 723 Ukrainian magical mystery ballots that were found in a samovar last week. From a memo by King County Superintendent of Elections Bill Huennekens that was offered in an exhibit by the Washington state GOP in its successful motion in Pierce County Court:
* As the election was administered and these ballots were received, we can confirm that 423 of these voters were sent a letter asking for an updated signature.For some reason I haven't seen this in any newspaper, or on the "I'd hate to make a fool of myself" blog of the Democratic braintrust. Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at December 19, 2004 05:45 PM | Email This
* If the voter sent back the completed letter, the signature was compared and the ballot accepted if the signature matched.
* If the voter did not return the letter, the ballots were kept secured in the vault and not tabulated and no reserach was done to find the voter's original registration form.
* Before certification of the Election on November 17, 2004, each of these ballots was reviewed again and researched.
* At certification of the election, these ballots were accounted for in the mail ballot report as signature mis-comparisons.
The memo clearly admits that these ballots were invalid as of the certification date. There is no way that court is going to rule that these ballots can be counted any more than the state lottery office would allow winning lottery numbers to be submitted after the drawing.
This is what the Democrats don't want to admit. It's not about counting votes. It's about submitting ballots after the election has ended in an attempt to get them added to the pool of certified ballots. Then, after they have those ballots in the pool, they can begin their righteous "counting of every vote."
The Supreme Court will be looking to establish a clear line. The easy and logical place to draw that line is in the language of "recount" and not "recanvass" which is clearly stated in the RCW.
You definitely won't find this great info in the MSM or the liberal blogs and that's why Sound Politics is "the unofficial home page of this contest," and where you will find informed and honest debate.
Posted by: Jeff B. on December 19, 2004 06:49 PMThey should also check Larry Phillips phone records for any contact between he and King County elections before last Sunday when he claims to have suddenly discovered his name on the list.
If that's the truth, then his phone records would not show otherwise.
Posted by: Jeff B. on December 19, 2004 06:54 PMIn Part 1. Bill Huennekens says: "At conversion to our new system early this summer, we had several thousand registration records that did not have a record attached. A concerted effort was made to scan and link the signature in the new system upon conversion."
The way I read this, is that after the conversion (migration of data from the old system to the new system) even though they had made a concerted effort to link all of the signature records during the conversion, they still had several thousand records without a [signature] record attached.
Of course one wonders if it ever occured to Bill and team that maybe there were no valid signature records for those several thousand records?
In August, out of "several thousand records" they mailed 1,146 letters to voters. It's not clear how many of those voters responded, why several thousand whittled down to 1,146, or if these records are in any way connected with the currently disputed ballots that were cast and rejected due to missing signature records. It's plausible that these records were simply non-existent, and so it's ridiculous to now go back and try to add these records, soley for the sake of adding more ballots, more than a month after the election and certification.
There is so much room for error here, that the Supreme Court is clearly going to rule as it did in the its previous ruling that the only way to take a fair stand here is to back up to the certification of the election and accept only ballots valid as of Nov. 17th.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/204469_gov20.html
Posted by: Richard Pope on December 19, 2004 11:31 PMFrom the memo:
This spring, I learned that the long standing operating procedure for absentee voters who did not have a signature in the system was to let the ballot count.
We did have an ongoing issue with newer registrations that were entered over the counter where individuals were given a ballot.
Posted by: South County on December 20, 2004 10:12 AM