Many readers have asked how they can help mine the county voter databases for indications of illegal voting and other irregularities.
The short answer is: Yes, please!
The longer answer is: Here is what you have to do to get started
1. Obtain your own copy of the voter list for your favorite county. The county auditors/election officials are required by law to make this information available to the public. This is public information, and the cost is relatively modest, but I'm not going to release my own copy for two reasons: (1) there are legal restrictions on the use of this data; I'm not willing to accept the liability risk that my copy of the data could get into the wrong hands and be misused. (2) The King County file is huge, and I'm not willing to pay for the bandwidth hit of letting others download it.
To get your copy of the King County file, contact Records and Elections here. Call in advance, they usually need a day's notice to burn a CD for you. The normal file costs $3.40. They're charging $33.50 for the one-off version with the Nov. election data.
Other counties, look up the county auditor. Hint: I haven't looked at Pierce and Thurston Counties. But they are probably worth mining for irregularities. Fees will vary.
2. Make sure you're in a position to use the data. The files I've seen are plain text, either fixed-position or delimited and can be read easily by standard applications. The King County file contains over a million records. The other large counties will be in the hundreds of thousands. This is too big for Excel. I've found the King County file loads easily into Microsoft Access. It also helps if you're a programmer and can crunch the raw text. Perl is a particularly good language to use for this.
3. Take the initiative, do your own research, share your findings (prudently).
I'm not in a good position to assign tasks and coordinate a distributed effort, but I will share information. If you find anything interesting let me know (or post on your own blog) and I'll help publicize it as appropriate. One note of caution on this: use your best judgment whether certain information is best publicized immediately or whether publicizing it earlier than necessary might help the other side prepare a defense, or needlessly embarrass people who have done nothing wrong (There are places to privately report really suspicious findings for further investigation). I may not always make the perfect choices about what to publish and what to postpone publishing. But I'm trying to keep a reasonable balance between keeping the story building, and saving certain items to help build a legal case. Everything in the voter database IS public data, but as a general rule, I refrain from posting personal data and specific addresses in most cases.
Have a go at it.
Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at January 03, 2005 01:33 PM | Email ThisAccording to today's Times, Sam thinks he was caught between a rock and a hard place because the Rossi people didn't want him to certify the election but "the [Washington] constitution" required otherwise. Wrong, Sam. The 14th Amendment of the U.S. CONSTITUION (which, Sam may not know, is SUPREME to our state constitution) requires that one county elections board cannot apply different standards for recounts than other county elections boards. This is the clear holding of the Bush v. Gore case, and it is controlling here.
By certifying the election and not obtaining a court declaration that Bush v. Gore requires the use of uniform statewide rules on the recount, Sam Reed has made sure that those ballots that were rejected THROUGH NO FAULT OF THE VOTERS (including, incidentally, some military ballots) will never be counted in any other county EXCEPT KING COUNTY. The voters of King County apparently matter more than those in Spokane or the Tri-Cities or Hoquiam. Sorry suckers: you don't live in Seattle, and Sam Reed thinks it's okay to selectively read the law in order to disenfrachise you. It's inexplicable, it's unconstitutional, and it's immoral.
Shame on Sam Reed. He should be recalled.
Posted by: Larry on January 3, 2005 02:12 PMThanks,
Robyn
What you CAN do, JG, is start a letter writing and petition campaign to help expedite the housecleaning. We must start, of course, with Sam Reed, whose stupendous arrogance and "what me worry?" insouciance simply begger imagination. Sam Reed's most important job is to insure the integrity of the statewide electoral process, and he utterly failed. And he's completely clueless too: Doesn't he understand that all that the allegedly partisan Katherine Harris did was precisely THE SAME THING Sam that did -- certify an election when called to by state law? But Katherine didn't do so in the face of a U.S. Supreme Court decision that EXPLICTLY mandated uniform statewide recounting standards. For Reed to criticize Katherine Harris when his conduct has been more incompetent, more unfair, and plainly illegal is simply breathtaking.
I know the Times and P.I. will characterize it as a "State GOP Civil War," but the Rossi people need to teach the Olympia wing of the party that they don't run the show anymore. Republicans will not win elections in this state if all we do is try to make nice with Democrats and distance ourselves from the national GOP. We need to call bullshit on these guys: like the Democrats, they're lazy, they're corrupt, and -- with the advent of Rossi and Rob McKenna -- their days are numbered.
Republicans need to oust Sam Reed.
Posted by: Larry on January 3, 2005 04:18 PMTonight on King 5 News - both at 5 and 6:30 - THEY ACTUALLY ADMITTED THE RESULTS OF THEIR STATEWIDE POLL!! (Should there be a revote in the Governors race?)
The results showed 59% of those responding (statewide) are in favor of a revote!
OK...It almost makes me suspicious...
Where are they going with this?
Is the liberal media so confident that there will not be a revote - that they can afford to present these poll results to the public? Does King 5 just not like Gregoire for some reason? Okay..I know..just a wee bit skeptical here.....It's just hard for me to accept *good* news from this media outlet.....Especially when it's dealing with politics...
Hmmm....
Posted by: Deborah on January 3, 2005 07:16 PMGregoire might be hard pressed to reach the 40% mark in a revote. The more she acts out in triumph, the more voters will hold it against her when the election results are nullified. And I would love it if she lost by more than the 17.74% margin that she beat me by in 2000.
Posted by: Richard Pope on January 3, 2005 11:55 PMI'm going to "try" to get together the voter data for the entire state.
I need volunteers from every county.
I'm not trying to take away anything that Shark is doing. I will provide Shark a copy of the data once I have it compiled.
Please visit my blog by clicking on my name below.
Posted by: Brett Kappenman on January 4, 2005 04:49 PMLet me know.
(360) 779-4543
You do good work.
Dorothy G. Deits
Posted by: DOROT HY G. DEITS on March 21, 2005 09:27 AM