The bottom line: King County's reported validation thresholds are not correct. These numbers will be used as official thresholds to determine whether this year's local tax or bond measures have sufficient voter turnout for passage. If left uncorrected, reliance on these numbers could wrongly decide the results in close contests.
Anybody involved on either side of a local revenue measure campaign this year would do well to demand that King County Elections correct and document the validation thresholds.
King County Elections is required to calculate "validation" numbers, which are used as thresholds to determine whether local tax and bond measures meet the State Constitutional requirements for passage (60% majority, with 40% participation). By state administrative law [WAC 434-062-017] these are "calculated based on the number of voters credited for voting in each jurisdiction" in each November election and used for the following year. The accuracy of the validation numbers have practical consequences in the case of a close election on a bond or levy question. King County's numbers are mostly too low, which means that relying on them could lead to a bond or levy measure being incorrectly certified as passed. But other accounting errors could lead to incorrectly high validation thresholds, causing a rightfully successful ballot measure to be wrongfully invalidated.
According to the various reconciliation reports [for Mail, Polling Place, Provisional and Early Voter ballots], the total number of voters who should have been credited is very close to 930,300. But as I pointed out the other day, the official list of credited voters is short about 200 voters whom elections staff claim should have been credited but weren't credited on the official list.
I don't have the complete breakdown of junior taxing districts into precincts and partial precincts, so I can't report detailed errors at that level. But it's clear from some of the numbers that the methodology used to calculate them could not have been correct. The published Validation Summary table shows only 930,038 voters for Metropolitan King County and 930,085 for Port of Seattle. Those jurisdictions correspond to the same group of voters. The numbers should be identical. Likewise, if you add up the numbers for all Cities, Towns and Unincorporated Rural King County, the total should be identical to the numbers for Metropolitan King County and the Port. But the actual total, 929,982, matches neither. All three numbers should be very close to 930,300.
I also know from analyzing the records that I've received that the number of credited voters in City of Seattle should be at least 332,748. But the "Total Votes Cast" for Seattle in the validation report is 332,603.
It seems that some of inputs used to calculate the published validation numbers are based on ballots tabulated, other inputs are based on the incorrectly low number of voters credited. The number of voters credited should normally be slightly higher than the number of ballots, due to empty envelopes and voided ballots. So substituting ballots counted for voters credited will understate turnout relative to the legal standard, as will using an incomplete list of credited voters as was done here. I also found that there were cases of ballots which were tabulated in the wrong districts. In those cases a jurisdiction could have an incorrectly high validation threshold.
"forty percent of the total number of voters voting in such taxing district in the last preceding general election"
In order for a "voter" to actually "vote", the voter has to return a ballot for that election. A voter can be credited for voting, without actually returning a ballot. Indeed, it is impossible to know whether a given voter has actually cast their ballot. A poll voter can take the ballot home, or throw it away, without putting the ballot into the machine or ballot box. A mail voter can do lots of things: not put the security envelope inside the mailing envelope, not put any ballot in the envelope at all, use a ballot from a previous election (believe it or not, but this actually happens, especially with unused primary ballots being mailed in for a general election!), or send in a protest note instead of a ballot.
So if a voter signs up to participate in the election, but does not actually cast a ballot, then the voter has not actually voted in the election. Using the number of ballots actually counted, instead of the number of voters signing a poll sheet or ballot envelope, satisfies the constitutional standard of "the total number of voters voting".
Posted by: Richard Pope on February 3, 2009 06:04 PMUnless a junior taxing district has an issue on the ballot in the November election, the ballot styles don't necessarily encode enough information to identify which voters voted from that district. Taxing districts can and do divide precinct. And unless the ballots are designed so that there is a unique ballot style for every possible combination of overlapping districts, you can't tell exactly how many votes came from each district.
I believe that it would be impractical to do that except when specific districts actually have measures on the ballot. So you have to go by the credited voters.
I believe that is one of the reasons why the WAC defines "voters voted" in terms of credited voters, not in terms of ballots counted.
Your or my interpretation of the Constitution aside, the WAC which I cited is authoritative, no?
Posted by: Stefan Sharkansky on February 3, 2009 06:32 PMPope, you've gone sloppy on us again... The exact wording is, "calculated based on the number of voters credited for voting in each jurisdiction"
Maybe that wording makes sense, maybe it doesn't. But you don't change it by fiat, you change it by actually changing the wording.
Posted by: jpalmer on February 3, 2009 06:36 PM