I've been slogging through the King County voter registration transaction logs that Deanron finally released this month, more than six months after I requested them.
Among the things I've discovered -- up to 24 more people credited with voting twice in November 2004 than I had earlier reported. All of these were voters who were registered more than once and where King County actually eliminated the duplicate registration. I reported a number of these cases last month, and the new transaction log contains yet more information. The total number of possible double votes in King County in November 2004 is now up to 178. Sadly, it's a little late to do much with this information other than to castigate Deanron for failing to prevent the double votes and for failing to disclose this information in a timely fashion. A spreadsheet with the newly discovered doubly-credited voters is here (Caveats in the footnote 1). Moreover, I now have a clearer picture of the magnitude of the duplicate registration problem and how King County (mis)handled it --
King County started cleaning up the duplicate registrations on December 29, 2004, only days after the manual recount was over. At least 2,057 duplicates were eliminated in the spring of 2005 before the contest trial. 1,589 of these, or 77% of these duplicate registrations were created in 2004 before the November election. It appears that 26 of the duplicate registrations that were purged before the trial were credited with voting twice. Yet nobody in King County bothered to tell the public or the litigants in the contest trial. The log indicates that by March 13, 2006 (the latest entry in the transaction log), at least 11,578 duplicate registrations have been purged, of which 8,970 (77.5%) were created in 2004 before the November election. That means that nearly 6% of the roughly 157,000 registrations recorded in 2004 were duplicates. Roughly 120 of these individuals are credited with voting twice in November 2004, and a handful still voted twice in 2005. It's good that King County finally cleaned up the vast majority of the duplicate registrations, but it's troubling that they allowed so many in 2004 in the first place.
It had to have been pretty clear to King County officials even during the discovery phase of the contest trial that their own bungled processing of voter registrations led to a significant number of double votes. But for some reason, King County chose to keep this evidence of its negligence concealed from the contest trial. I wonder why.
More revelations from the transaction logs to come.
1 I stop short of accusing any of these individuals of voting twice. It's possible that the double credit may be attributable to Elections office clerical errors, or mistaken or fraudulent voting by a third party on behalf of the named voter. Also, it appears that a few of the pairs of names on the list are sufficiently different that they might represent two different people. However, these are pairs of voter registrations that King County identified as duplicate, and merged one of the registrations with the other. If these are not truly duplicate registrations, then King County merged the records in error. My original query produced a few such cases where two records appear to have been merged in error and later corrected. I removed from the list such cases that were clearly corrected after being merged in error.
Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at April 17, 2006 05:12 PM | Email ThisNot that there won't always be probelms with elections, but certainly, Dean Logan could have done much better about immediately addressing, and he absolutely could have been more forthcoming about these issues.
To me Dean Logan is the OJ of government.
Posted by: Jeff B. on April 17, 2006 05:51 PMI also feel that California is basically lost primarily because of the shear number of illegal alien votes cast in that state. I really don't know what you can do to fix it now.
Washingtonians better start praying hard that we don't lose this state as well.
Posted by: jaybo on April 17, 2006 06:15 PMIf the US Attorney won't get off his dead a** in spite of the mountain of evidence and some at the Federal level and do what he is paid to do, go over his head ! It seems rather ridiculous that a problem of this magnitude is not getting attention. What is the official status of this in the eyes of the Federal Government ?
Posted by: KS on April 17, 2006 07:16 PMI agree with Elaine though, these are just the simple forms of vote fraud...I feel there are thousands of fraudulent ballots where a more sophisticated method was used..just waiting to be found. They are probably right in front of our faces...
Posted by: Deborah on April 17, 2006 11:09 PMYou know it would be interesting to cross check the voter DB names with the WA live birth records DB for last 10 years or so. I bet there are at least a few 10 and unders registered and voting absentee in King County to give mom and dad moonbat a little extra edge over their neocon neighbors when voting. And I'll bet there was a surge of registrations of same surname family members just prior to election 2004. Many were legit to be sure, but I'll bet there were more than a few that took the liberty of honoring their young child with the right to vote.
Posted by: Jeff B. on April 17, 2006 11:22 PMIf it had been a Republican administration and the new results may have thrown the election to a Democrat, the Repubican would not have hidden the results, but would have cooperated with the judicial branch of government.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is the corruption of Sims and the Democrat party.
Posted by: swatter on April 18, 2006 07:24 AMand these people walk around proud! see me! look what we are doing and nobody can do anything about it!
and then i go to the movies, and the little brainwashed highschoolers working there have the NERVE to ask me for an ID when i use my debit card!!!!!!!!!!! i say, gee, you don't even need to do this to VOTE in this state,,,,,,,
all i get is a blank stare,,,,,,
Maybe wes should get in touch with da Wrigley Gum people abouts a new Ad Campaign, featuring Double Mint Gum and Double Votes.
Forgetaboutit
Pity that our REPRESENTATIVES and OUR government do not take our "RIGHT" to vote with as much seriousness.
Of course, in some cases the government REQUIRES business to get ID in order to process a transaction. How easily was grandma able to buy cold medicine this winter?
"Trust, but verify" - Ronald Reagan
"Government is like a baby. An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other." - Ronald Reagan
Posted by: SouthernRoots on April 18, 2006 10:08 AMIt seems that Ron Sims is guilty of so much. Why should a little voting problem bring him down.
Remember those 17 painters that lost their jobs for taking off to demonstrate. It was Sims and the Union that pressured the company to hire them back. No problem you say. Turns out 12 of them were self confesses illegal aliens. So Mr. Sims and company are pressuring companies to hire illegal aliens. Next thing you know the illegals will come to Seattle to get their driver's license and register to vote, courtesy of the Motor Voter Act. Sorry, that is already occurring.
And you were concern about a few thousand votes. Kind of worrying about the molding when the walls are caving in.
Posted by: Snuffy on April 19, 2006 07:29 AM