KING5 TV did a shocking exposee of vote fraud in King County -- back in March 1998.
Will Baker, the, er, "untraditional" Republican candidate for State Auditor has the videos posted on his website. The videos speak for themselves.
Do watch both the first piece and the follow up.
[I don't know how much bandwidth Will Baker has, the download might be slow]
Many of the issues that I thought I exposed on this blog -- multiple registrations for the same individual (that we learned today really did enable multiple voting), and hundreds of illegal registrations at private mailboxes -- were reported on TV back in 1998. Watch as county officials express shock! shock! that such things were going on and then promise to form committees to clean up the mess.
That the same garbage is still going on 6 years later, you really have to wonder whether the King County Elections office is deliberately managed incompetently in order to facilitate distributed vote fraud, or if it's merely a case of criminal negligence.
hat tip: Josef Kunzler
Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at January 04, 2005 12:46 PM | Email ThisProbably not very much. He didn't even update his website one iota when he ran for State Auditor -- and listed the website in the voter's pamphlet.
Posted by: Richard Pope on January 4, 2005 01:02 PMMy observation of this sort of phenomena (and, yes, I have seen it elsewhere), is that the status quo remains in place as long as the election results are what the local powers that be want them to be. In other words, in 1998 my guess is that they liked the results of King County voters had wrought under that system. So why in the h-e-doublehockeystick would they want to tamper with it?
And I'm not just talking necessarily about candidates running for office here. There is the matter of tax measures and such that go to the ballot, issues which are near and dear to the hearts of public employees and elected officials. If those measure start getting defeated, if the public starts saying "No!" a little bit too often, then things start being done to and in the elections office and to the way voters are handled to make these measures harder to defeat.
Posted by: jay bird on January 4, 2005 01:21 PMHow can you in good conscience want to see Gregoire sworn in with these results when you know as absolute fact that many voters were illegally registered to Mailbox Outlets and Storage Facilites.
Sheesh, it boggles the mind that this happens over and over again, and that the obviously partisan response by Democrats has been "don't worry, we will fix it by next time" again and again.
Please, anyone who is an honest Democrat, speak up and tell us that you are concerened and that you'd rather see a revote then know that the election has been tainted.
And everyone, please email King 5 at news@king5.com and ask them why there has been so little scrutiny for such an important race, especially given their 1998 investigative story.
Posted by: Jeff B. on January 4, 2005 01:27 PMWhat we need to do is dump you libs and cons so we can get a semblance of a democracy back.
Posted by: Tobias on January 4, 2005 01:42 PMSaddam Hussein thought the same way. He just had a different idea than you about what the end goal should be.
***
No. What we need to do is make elections much much harder to cheat at, so that the results can be trusted.
Guess what?" Since it seems that what's going on here in Cook County has a much larger effect on the state than Podunk County, it's more important to clean up things here, first. And if we do manage to clean it up and restore King County again, Podunk County and Spokane County will get caught in the undertow, and get cleaned up too.
These problems with the system only get exposed (or really matter) when there are close elections that matter. That's what we've got here. For a state whose people supposedly cared about "good government" to sweep the problems under the rug because one party likes the results, or because "everybody does it", just shows where the real problem lies, and how hard it will be to fix.
Posted by: Raoul Ortega on January 4, 2005 02:01 PMHow about just sheer laziness on the part of the 'officials' to not do anything? I'm starting to think that it's the hubris that I encounter all the time...that everyone 'assumes' I'm a liberal and when they find out I'm not, they are floored because it's as if they are meeting a conservative for the first time. I'm wondering if that isn't playing into 'why' nothing has been done when these problems were first exposed in 1998. They probably figured that KC would *always* be very liberal anyway, so the chances of any of these issues actually becoming an issue were slim and no one wanted to do the tough work that goes into fixing this kind of mess.
Posted by: Emily on January 4, 2005 02:34 PMThe answer is: "All of them."
Every vote which cannot be shown to have been conducted properly and in accordance with the law, is suspect. All of them.
That means Sound Transit, "Safeco Feild", the Library bond, the Medic One Levy, the Election of Ron Sims, the Election of Jim "Two Tapes" McDermott, the linking of state wages to the CPI, the property tax reform initatives, the good ones and the bad ones, all are suspect. Especially any which were close or went the "other way" (and I don't care which way that "other" was) is, "obviously" a result of the voting fraud inherent in the system.
Posted by: Peter on January 4, 2005 02:42 PMHmmmm. I just assumed that by re-registering in a new county the old county would automatically get notice and I'd be taken off its voter list. I wonder how many other people are registered in multiple counties and what would have happened if I had also tried to vote in King County?
To what extent are the separate county voter databases coordinated statewide? Seems like that might be a huge loophole for distributed voter fraud.
Posted by: LoneWolf on January 4, 2005 02:48 PMIs it possible some parts/precincts of Seattle had 100%+ turnout, if number of votes could be compared to legitimate registration totals? Does this provide incentive for sloppy registration records?
Posted by: South County on January 4, 2005 02:56 PMWith all the problems that we know exist in our voter registration and tallying procedures, why would anyone have any more confidence in the results of a revote?
Posted by: Steve on January 4, 2005 02:57 PMSome of these people are considerably better informed than before about the process and about the checks that it is supposed to contain.
Moreover, lots of people would probably volunteer as observers.
The WA election board would be doing its work knowing that the pajamahadeen are just waiting for them to make mistakes. Contrast to the Nov. election, when they were sure nobody was paying much attention.
***
Even so, the vote could end up being very close, but that's a separate problem.
"Leninist"? I love the name-calling. It's just like those on the lib blogs who call me "fascist".
No, you guys are just mad because you want to be right, and you don't want to admit that your myopic agenda that deliberately fails to make connections (just like your co-ruling liberals who you profess to hate) is every bit as dangerous as the Democratic Party's agenda. Don't you care about your childrens' futures?
Buncha brainwashed chumps!
Posted by: Tobias on January 4, 2005 03:29 PMGet in touch with your inner Stalin.
Posted by: Bostonian on January 4, 2005 03:41 PMVery good analysis of the situation.
Posted by: Jim on January 4, 2005 04:03 PMRon Sims has failed the County and should be removed. He is the one that has to accept responsibility for this fiasco that he promised he would fix.
Isn't he up for re-election this year?
Posted by: jaybo on January 4, 2005 04:29 PM"LOL!
"Leninist"? I love the name-calling. It's just like those on the lib blogs who call me "fascist". "
Then writes:
"Buncha brainwashed chumps!"
Gee, Tobias, brilliant way to get your points across. Keep up the great commentary.
Posted by: Shaun on January 4, 2005 04:47 PMExcellent question! I was wondering the same thing. Will the election feature same parade of provisional voters, missing voters, and missing ballots? How to avoid this? Certainly it is the case the any winning margin less than 5,000 votes (approximately) will be subject to suspicion. Regardless of how many observers are involved (maybe even because so many observers are involved?).
At least this time absentee ballots can get sent to our military voters in a reasonable manner.
Iconoclast
Posted by: iconoclast on January 4, 2005 05:11 PMit's a riot folks.
Posted by: noel on January 4, 2005 05:20 PMSome fence-sitters might vote D instead of R, but I'd betcha even more go the other way, solely because Americans do not like fraud.
Posted by: Bostonian on January 4, 2005 06:06 PMDeep thinkers, twenty & thirty years ago, posited a false equivalence between the players in the Cold War: Post-Stalinists were no worse than us; we were no better than them. Bolshoi-it.
Deep thinkers now tell us that Democrats are indistinguishable from Dinocrats. We're all chumps.
Today's deep thinkers haven't been thinking very deeply about DSHS. Would it be iconoclastic to suggest that Democrats with their Gregoirian chants made DSHS, an unaccountable bureaucratic monster that plays by no rules but Enron's? Would it be a trifle too pedantic to suggest that Christine isn't pristine, that she craps in her own nest & likes it, that she won't clean up her own mess? And that because DSHS is a fat-cat Democrat mess, maybe Governor Rossi can clean it up?
Ort am I just being a chump?
Posted by: sandalista on January 4, 2005 06:59 PMWe the legal registered voters of WA state want a revote to be done ONLY by registered voters who shall bring proof of citizenship and current valid ID to the voting place at which point, thier one and only one vote shall be tallied IN PERSON.
???????
Don't even start by reminding me about all the felons and dead people I might be disenfranchising.
Posted by: Julie on January 4, 2005 09:52 PM- Many people are upset with the King County elections process, but this same process and associated errors occured in all of the counties, of which Rossi won most. Also, the other counties had a higher percentage of discrepancies (of total votes cast). Why are people calling out King County specifically and not complaining about the results in the counties that Rossi won?
- People are complaining that the process is broken and should have been fixed long ago. The Secratary of State is responsible for the elections process and a Republican has held this office since 1980. It's unlikely that a Republican Sec of State is keeping the process unchanged in order to have a Democrat win any office. Don't put the blame on Democrats for something that a Republican has been responsible for, for the past 24 years.
- I believe the errors have been inflated to rouse people for a recount and are much fewer than advertised. Voter verification is done on the front end and not on the backend reconciliation process. The errors advertised have been on the reconciliation process that isn't meant as a check and balance on identifying voter fraud.
- It's intersting that the dead folk described in the paper voted for Rossi and people here are complaining about it. Also interesting is the fact that the 'felons' (who may have had their voting eligibility reinstated -we don't know) would most likely NOT have voted for Christine Gregoire - the Attorney General.
A recount would still produce the same problems as we've already experienced. Add to that - new voters, getting ballots out to and from military, and people who've died in the past two months, and we will still have the same situation.
I would not want to see my tax dollars spent on redoing this election as I believe the results would continue to be scrutinized until the horse is pulverized. The millions of dollars would be better spent elsewhere.