Both King and Snohomish Counties told me that they could not satisfy my request to provide accurate lists of people who voted on Nov. 2 because they only keep a fresh file of currently registered voters. If that is the case, they are in violation of state law re: "Records concerning accuracy and currency of voters lists"
Each county auditor shall maintain for at least two years and shall make available for public inspection and copying all records concerning the implementation of programs and activities conducted for the purpose of insuring the accuracy and currency of official lists of eligible voters. These records must include lists of the names and addresses of all persons to whom notices are sent and information concerning whether or not each person has responded to the notices. These records must contain lists of all persons removed from the list of eligible voters and the reasons why the voters were removed.Of course, it's possible that they are not in violation of state elections law, in which case they are in violation of the Public Disclosure Act for failing to satisfy my request. I'm almost hoping it's the latter, as it could be quite a windfall in fines that would come my way. Any lawyers interested in representing me?
[Indeed I discovered that about 250 people who were credited with voting in the King County Dec. 29 file were missing from the Jan. 7 file. This is something that the county should have just disclosed to the public. Not everybody who has the right to inspect a full copy of the voter list has both an archive of old files and the ability to write SQL "left join" queries]
hat tip: Bob Williams of the Evergreen Freedom Foundation.
Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at January 09, 2005 01:23 PM | Email ThisThree notes:
1.) Its possible they have the means to construct it but do not have it. In other words, they could go through all the lists of signatures, etc.
2.) Of course if there are more votes than voters than there is NO way to get a list, in which case you may have them in a catch 22.
3.) I'm not sure of their backup procedures, but most public organizations have daily backups of all electronic data, though it may not be easily recovered.
Posted by: VaCSProf on January 9, 2005 02:42 PMSURELY Ukraine County.... oops: Sorry, good people of Ukraine; did not mean to insult you: KING County.... does database backups ??..
And if there was EVER a time when you would want to be absolutely sure you made and saved a verified FULL database backup, surely that would be on election day ??.. ditto on machine-recount certification day, and manual-recount certification day ??..
So even if King (and other) counties claim they cannot satisfy a request for accurate 2 Nov voter lists from their ONLINE database, I would expect that info is on a backup tape or a RAID farm somewhere.... While they might be able to charge a little more for retrieving data from backup media, most backup restores today are essentially one-button operations; so it should really not be that big a job (a million+ voter records is not a very big database anymore, relatively speaking).
.... SURELY they could not be so totally incompetent that they do not do daily full or partial backups; or even that they quickly overwrite all prior backups ??... could they ??..
Methow Ken
Nor did they factor in any of the eyewitnesses.
Posted by: Bostonian on January 9, 2005 03:10 PM RCW 29A.08.770
Records concerning accuracy and currency of voters lists. (Effective until January 1, 2006.)
Is there is Prior RCW that's effective now? Or am I missing something?
Posted by: GoodJim on January 9, 2005 03:21 PMThen you hear Gregoire get on the news, days later, claiming that there is "absolutely no evidence of fraud" in this election.
How does she know? How can she be so sure of herself - unless she happens to know how well the incompetence (giddily allowed corruption) was carried out?
Or so she thinks!
Posted by: TADD on January 9, 2005 06:33 PMThat is, we don't even want the Nov 2 voter registration list - we want the August 31 voter list, or whatever precise date that actually ended up being this year.
The cases reported of people handing in both a provisional ballot and a voter registration form at the same time seems like something easily prevented if the disclosure PRECEDES the actual vote.
Posted by: Al on January 9, 2005 06:58 PMYes!
The other counties staggered their tallies this time! King County was not allowed to be last - though they tried to stall on numerous occaisions! It was very telling when KC *found* those 10,000+ ballots AFTER the other counties certified in the original count! If you remember - it was 2 days before certification that KC made their announcement of the ballot find!
It is hysterical that even with that many produced ballots - KC was still short!
With the other counties holding back on their final numbers - it must have been a nightmare for King County! Can you imagine the number crunching going on?
If the other counties were ALREADY anticipating *funky* business with KC - and were purposely holding back on their final numbers....Me thinks perhaps there is (and has been) a lot more investigation going on with our elections than we even know about.........Hmmmmm.....I wonder....?
No wonder the Dems are running scared! They probably saw this coming when the other countys staggered! They are so busted!
Posted by: Deborah on January 9, 2005 07:53 PMThe implications are enormous here....
I saw the staggering of the county tallies - I thought perhaps someone finally had a clue about King County...Then seeing the post above about purposely holding off reporting final numbers so KC wouldn't be able to do something funky......
But to actually coordinate 38 counties to purposely stagger their final number reporting.....? Who could do this? This is huge! This is Federal...or higher...
I think King County has been stung...
Could it be that the cavalry has been here since *before* the election?
Posted by: Deborah on January 9, 2005 11:57 PM