King County's absentee ballot "batch slips" are documentary evidence that the ballot accounting problems were so severe that we'll probably never really know how many valid ballots were actually processed.
Even though King County Elections is stonewalling me on the release of the complete absentee ballot audit trail, they are letting me look at and make copies of the paper batch slips. Here are just three batch slips with some of the most extreme examples showing just what a bunged mess the ballot processing was.
They also provided a spreadsheet that summarizes the data on the batch slips [1MB zip]. It's full of data entry errors and missing data items, so it's only worth so much by itself. But it does confirm that there are unexplained discrepancies by the hundreds.Batch 55: verified on October 19, opened on October 25, tabulated who knows when (the spreadsheet below says Nov.2) No tabulator name given. 32 more ballots were tabulated than should have existed. No explanation is given.
Batch 979: verified and opened on October 29, tabulated on November 3. 17 more ballots were tabulated than should have existed. No explanation is given.
Batch 1236: verified and opened on November 1, tabulated who knows when (the spreadsheet says November 3). No tabulator name is given. 28 fewer ballots were tabulated than should have been counted. No explanation is given.
N.B. The three batch slips above are from a stack of about 80 slips that for reasons which weren't explained to me, the elections office pulled from the main stack of batch slips and placed in a separate stack labeled "Nicole". (Nicole Way is the name of the absentee ballot supervisor who was placed on administrative leave for falsified the Mail Ballot Report. It sounds like there might be a connection between these batch slips and Nicole Way's personnel investigation, but I'm not certain of this).
Can anyone say anything knowledgable about breaking for lunch in the middle of processing 300 ballots?
The processing flow is basically like an assembly line at any production plant. If a batch is started at one of the stations, say an hour before lunch, then the processor will not be able to complete it before lunch starts.
During the lunch break, the ballots that the processors are working on are secured and guarded, and they simply pick up where they left off before lunch.
Much related to this election is inappropriate, but the lunch break notation is normal and proper. (And about the only thing accurately accounted for on the slip...)
Posted by: Susan B. Anthony on April 14, 2005 02:44 PMFor the third slip, there are no entries for write-in and dupes. Given the relatively high numbers on other batch slips, it is curious there are none at all here. It may be the additional ballots should have been listed there but were not.
Posted by: Wayne on April 14, 2005 03:00 PMIs another batch slip (or transmittal) made up for these ballots so the count can be connected to the original ballot batch?
The remaining ballots are run through the accuvote machine, and some additional ballots are rejected by the machine. These added ballots are also sent to be duplicated and counted elsewhere.
Same question as above.
Once you start spreading the ballots in a batch around the MBOS, unless there are many controls, you have just simply made it easy for fraud to occur; just slip some new ballots into the batches of dups.
But if anybody knows the answer to my question above, please enlighten me.
Posted by: MIMike on April 14, 2005 03:04 PMIf you want to play tit for tat and throw out Cuyahoga county (Ohio), then you must also throw out Milwaukee and Madison Wisconsin, and probably Des Moines and Ames, Iowa. Hell, throw out the entire country, and you name the president of your choice.
None of it matters, here.
Lucy, think about it, none of it matters, here. What we have here is an election department that cannot account for the source of all ballots counted. Whether the errors are statistically significant or not, the King County election department cannot account for the source of all ballots cast. And to cover it up, they filed false statements about the election.
You can go on and on about Ohio, but the truth is, none of it matters here. You are talking about a presidential race, we are talking about a gubernatorial race, and none of what you are discussing matters here.
Do you get it now? If not, let me repeat: Lucy, nothing that happened in Ohio matters here!
To which I might add: Tom Delay is a congressman from Texas. We are dealing here with a gubernatorial election in Washington State. Newt Gingrich is a former congressman from Georgia. What Newt Gingrich says about Tom Delay is not pertinant to the discussion here. Nothing that a congressman from Georgia says about a congressman from Texas matters here.
I know you are someway associated with the educational establishment here in Washington. If a student in a math class continually brought up statements which did not pertain to the class, he would be sent to the principal's office. Same thing happens here.
Sorry, but I strongly disagree. Everything points to the fact that the Republican Party is peopled with characters for whom ethics and fraud is simply standard operating procedure.
The fact that, to date, only two known Republicans -- Christopher Shays and Newt Gingrich -- have been the only ones to voice any objections to the HOUSE MAJORITY LEADER'S total and complete lack of ethics and fraudulent behavior, speaks volumes.
No Republican in the State of Washington, either here on this blog or anywhere else that I am aware of, has come out with any criticism of DeLay or his cronies. Yet you yell and scream about a handful of insignificant human errors in a close election where all that has happened is that a group of well-meaning election volunteers may have made routine clerical errors.
All you are, are a bunch of partisan hack hypocrites when you can't see real fraud when it stares you in the face.
Posted by: Nelson on April 14, 2005 04:05 PMFor example, it seems to show that fewer than 26,000 provisional ballots were accepted as valid and included in the vote tabulation. Yet, their original provisional ballot report stated that 27,641 were valid and counted -- and their revision on Jan. 18, 2005 said 28,010 were valid and counted.
Posted by: Micajah on April 14, 2005 04:15 PM"....a group of well-meaning election volunteers may have made routine clerical errors."
Whew! I'm glad you straightened that out. For a while there I was thinking these were non-routine clerical errors.
Posted by: Ken Muller on April 14, 2005 04:17 PMJust this once I'll explain it to you again (and I usually don't humor pinheads). Whether or not what you say about Tom Delay is true or not, it matters not a whit to this thread on this blog. Understand, it doesn't matter here!!
Posted by: MIMike on April 14, 2005 04:19 PMthe worms crawl in - the worms crawl out --
The heat and spotlight is turning up on the democraps and the vast majority of the scum are just as, if not far more guilty of what they claim are transgressions by Delay -- the demo's are just scared to death that he is in the process of outting da judges -- "Heah come da judge" is gonna turn into - "Dere go da judge" -- ethics?? -- democrap mantra - "We doan need no stinkin' ethics" -- but wait - what do we have here - the shining example of virtue and high ethical standards of conduct -- on the hill (as in Capital Hill) none other than Baghdad Jim
Posted by: Bill on April 14, 2005 04:23 PMIf you go through the accuntability page of the spreadsheet, you'll notice a series of 67 batches, spread out across the entire sheet, where the "original count" is blank, but the "# of Ballots accepted" is non-zero. Totaling the two columns gives the numbers at the bottom, but the total of the 67 entries with no "Original Count" is 11860, which should be added to the 571,284 total ballots (a number which appears in several places on the sheets).
The total for "Original Count" should be 571,284 + 11,860 = 583,144, because you can't have 11,860 ballots which didn't come form someplace.
It also appears that more than 10,000 of these ballots appeared on election day. This may be the source of the "Magical Mystery Ballots" that you have written about.
In any case, batch slips for the 67 batches with no "Original Count" might prove enlightening.
Posted by: MIMike on April 14, 2005 04:33 PMNice projection, but the subject here is the competence and character of the King County Elections Department minions. Your description fits them perfectly. Many thanks.
Second, although nearly everyone reading this will already understand this, it deserves stressing that these mistakes were made, not by those elderly volunteers out in the precincts that they like to blame, but by regular employees of the election office. Wonder what union they belong to and what civil service protections they have?
Posted by: Jim Miller on April 14, 2005 04:48 PMIf you are so concerned about Tom Delay, why don't you do something about it? This blog is about local politics. I've read the posts from you two and all you do is whine about issues from other areas of the country. So--put your money where your mouth is. Do the research, come back with cold hard facts. Stefan doesn't just post here, he does the work. The more research he does, the worse King County Elections, Sims and Logan look. The clerical errors by little old lady volunteers disappeared about 3 months ago and the problems now look like a major cover-up.
If you have something interesting or relevent to post about local issues I say go for it. Otherwise, rant elsewhere.
Posted by: Berg3 on April 14, 2005 04:51 PMSince the answer is affirmative, my guess is corruption is an entirely human frailty, not limited by party affiliation. Those who are noble (yes there is such a character quality) stand against all such corruption even in their own party.
Time for question number 2: What do you propose to do about the obviously inept and corrupted system in KC? The correct answer is not to whine about the messengers/investigators, but to pressure your party to have the highest ethics possible--even higher than the desire to stay in power. It is your role to tell your state party, KC officials, and friends that the only way to properly lead is stand on the high moral ground, not to defend weakness. It may involve shedding incompetents or the corrupt, but the positive influence would outweigh the temporary pain.
Your willingness to defend the indefensible shows your concern for Delay et. al., is simply an act of corruption in itself.
One last thought--more Republicans have lost their positions because of Republican pressure than Dem's have lost theirs from Democratic pressure. If only the Democrats had recognized that about '98 or so, Gore may have won the White House. People might have been able to trust them for more than higher taxes, irresponsible social behaviors, and attacks on personal rights.
So dump the diversions, join the conversations with thoughtful responses, and welcome to the attempt to make sure your liberties are preserved in a decent voting system.
Posted by: Larry T on April 14, 2005 05:07 PMI came across the same thing "MIMike" notes in an earlier comment.
Look at the sheet in the Excel spreadsheet that is labeled "Daily Total Report."
For absentee ballots, it shows 564,230 accepted and 18,914 rejected for a total of 583,144 supposedly "processed." But then the number "processed" is given as 571,284.
They did the arithmetic and saw that they seem to have "processed" 11,860 more ballots than they received.
That 11,860 can be found on the "Accountability GEN04" sheet. There are about 65 batches for which they have no numbers at all in the "original count" column. They accepted 11,860 absentee ballots in those ~65 batches.
I believe all those batches had names beginning with "RB". Any idea what that stands for? ("IH" was used for "in-house" batches, which I suppose didn't come via PSI.)
Those 65 batches may be why Logan has said he doesn't know how many absentee ballots they received. If their records only show how many were accepted, but neither how many were originally in those batches nor how many were rejected, then he couldn't say how many absentee ballots were returned.
It looks as though the number of absentee ballots returned was something more than 583,144 (571,284 from the "original count" column and 11,860 from those 65 batches which have no number in the "original count" column).
I wonder if anyone knows where those "RB" batches came from.
Anybody want to bet that "RB" stands for "Rejected Ballots?" Just find a bunch of Gregoire ballots that had been rejected for signatures or something, batch them up, and run them through the machine. They don't show up in "Original Count" because they were counted in other batches, but at this point they're just as good as any other ballot, and nobody would know the difference save a certain "Shark" in the Puget Sound waters.
Posted by: MIMike on April 14, 2005 05:47 PMYou're a step ahead of me again. I got stuck on "Rossi Beaters," then finally hit on "rejected ballots."
I wonder if they sent their rejected ballots for "further research/review" and ended up accepting 11,860 of the initially rejected 18,914.
Maybe there's a reason why there's no employee's name associated with many of those "RB" batches.
Posted by: Micajah on April 14, 2005 06:03 PMDoes that mean that you admit you're IMMORAL?
1. Line 539 shows 139 unsealed absentee ballots from a blank polling place. Did that not raise any concerns with anybody? Where the heck did they come from?
2. Cells F557 and F553 - which just happen to be the last two lines - are formatted differently (center aligned) than the rest of the column.
Where they added by a diffent process than the rest of the data?
Last question - why are there no posts from people who know how these documents are created? Oh sorry, I forgot, there must have been a gag order.
Posted by: PGM on April 14, 2005 07:16 PMI am beginning to feel like Logan explaining his numbers - hee hee.
Perhaps what we need to do to show King County how much we detest the idea of all mail voting, how much we need true election reform and to prove to them how little faith we have in them, we should EACH HAND CARRY OUR BALLOT to Dean Logans office and ask that our signature be verified in our presence before we are willing to entrust them with our vote.
Posted by: Cheryl on April 14, 2005 07:35 PM"All you are, are a bunch of partisan hack hypocrites when you can't see real fraud when it stares you in the face."
You don't tell the whole story and conveniently leave out the part that incriminates the DemoRATs.
When you leftists start criticizing Senate minority leader, Harry Reid whose middle name is NEPOTISM, we will talk more about Tom Delay. What Delay did was not 1/10 as blatant as what Harry Reid did with paying off his family and relatives.
Nelson- you are the epitomy of the pot calling the kettle black, you stinkin' hypocrite !
Posted by: KS on April 14, 2005 09:10 PM"You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye;
and then you will see clearly enough to take the speck out of you brother's eye.
Do not give what is holy to dogs, and do not throw your pearls before swine,
lest they trample them under feet, and turn and tear you to pieces."
Matthew 7:5 and 6
Ignore lucidless, he is being dis-in-genius (and disingenuous).
The thing to do is pick one race where you honestly DO NOT CARE. Then vote for yourself as a write in.
So the published 'Voters who were credited' list will have your name, but if you don't see "County Dog Catcher: 1 vote for Cherryl" then you know something fishy happened.
It'll be interesting to see what they'd do with 500,000 write in ballots anyway.
I vote REJECT!
Posted by: Cheryl on April 15, 2005 12:12 AMCan you name any significant WA dems that have said that this election should be looked into and that the discrepencies should be explained?
That is the difference!
Posted by: Fred on April 15, 2005 09:09 AM