A couple of weeks ago I noted that the EFF filed suit against the Washington Secretary of State regarding underage voters. I noticed three of the voters on the list were from my county, so I contacted my county auditor, Carolyn Weikel*, and asked her about them. She was confused too, but did some research and got back to me today.
It turns out that all three were not registered with Snohomish County, despite being listed as registered with the state. The state will accept registration information, and pass it along to the county, which will then verify the information, accept it into the database (or not), and pass the information back up to the state. And Weikel told me that she wants the information, even for an underage voter: the county wants to have the control. And in these three cases, the controls worked. One was set as a "fatal pend" (election-speak for an ineligible registration) and the other two had been deleted.
It seems like what didn't quite work properly, if I understood correctly, is that some of the information didn't get back up to the state properly, or at least not very quickly. There will be temporary disrepancies between the state and county databases. Those three voters shouldn't have been in the state database (and I believe they no longer are, though whether it's because the county sent up information causing their removal, or the state was responding to the EFF's posting of the list of voters, I don't know), but what's important is that they are not registered with the county, and the county keeps the canonical database for its voters, not the state.
So the bottom line is that while there do seem to be some problems, at least in Snohomish County, those voters were not properly registered (despite what the state database said) and were never going to receive ballots.
* For those of you who may not recognize the name, Carolyn Diepenbrock was recently married, and has changed her name. Congratulations, Carolyn!
Cross-posted on <pudge/*>.
Posted by pudge at October 17, 2008 01:20 PM | Email ThisHave you seen Orbusmax?
THE QUEEN GETS SUED OVER ANTI-ROSSI ADS FOR DEFAMATION...
WA GOV RACE: Rossi has edge in money...
Posted by: Ragnar Danneskjold on October 17, 2008 02:04 PMAmen... except, they also spent OURS foolishly!
Posted by: Ragnar Danneskjold on October 17, 2008 02:10 PMhttp://www.gasbuddy.com/gb_gastemperaturemap.aspx
Highest gas in the nation.
Lots of traffic.
Water pollution galore.
If there is a "lag" in getting information back and forth between the State and a County, what's the methodology for cross-checking the data of each against each other to ferret out bad registrations?
Does the cut-off date to register for an election provide sufficient time to do this checking?
Posted by: BA on October 17, 2008 05:34 PMI don't know the exact mechanisms of how they reconcile differences. However, I don't think the cut-off date is too relevant: it's still up to the county to get the data and verify it, and until they get that data from the state and put it into their database the citizen won't get a ballot.
My guess is that the state gets those registrations to the county quickly, but the county data going back to the state may not happen as quickly.
I am not sure though.
Posted by: pudge on October 17, 2008 05:42 PMCheck out state law:
RCW 29A.08.105
Official list, secretary of state -- County auditor, duties -- Registration assistants.
(1) In compliance with the Help America Vote Act (P.L. 107-252), the centralized statewide voter registration list maintained by the secretary of state is the official list of eligible voters for all elections.
- Brian Zylstra, Deputy Communications Director, Office of Secretary of State
Especially since we know that the statewide database had ineligible voters in it that the county had already rejected months earlier.
Posted by: pudge on October 17, 2008 06:20 PMOf those four, one Election Systems and Software (ES&S) has no real-time connectivity to the statewide VRDB. The problem is that ES&S is used by multiple large counties. So, if someone registers in a county that has ES&S, they could possibly register in another county that utilizes another elections vendor because there is no real-time connectivity for them. Sam Reed's office has allowed this problem to fester for over a year as ES&S has missed contractual deadline after deadline.
Plus, Reed's office is being assailed by multiple county auditors for his office to fix this and he has sat on his hands, even though the county's have said this is a significant issue.
But, Reed's elections staff that only one staff memmber has actually ran an election from the local level has no idea the issues that elections personnel face because his staff continues up to as late as yesterday changes WAC's and recommendations so as to make elections workers duties more difficult.
There will be errors this general election in many counties and Reed's staff and their ridicolous suggestions are the cause.
So, if a new voter registers at the deadline for new registratns on the 20th. in an ES&S county, they could have already received their ballot from another county because they are mailed 20 days prior to election, but since ES&S does not have connectivity to the state VRDB, they could get two ballots in two different counties and chances are it would never be caught. But,
Posted by: elections dude on October 18, 2008 10:53 AM