GOP says hundreds of ballots suspect

Two King County election workers, both Republicans, yesterday said they believe hundreds of provisional ballots were illegally fed through vote-counting machines on Election Day.

The special ballots are given to voters who show up at the wrong precinct on Election Day or whose registration is in question, and they are supposed to be set aside until the voter's status can be determined.

Election officials acknowledge that once provisional ballots were put through voting machines, it became impossible to separate legitimate from illegitimate ballots.

Joe O'Donnell, who worked on King County's 26-member canvassing crew after the Nov. 2 vote, said he learned of 150 to 300 instances in which provisional ballots went through counting machines at polling places.

O'Donnell said at a GOP news conference in Bellevue that he learned about most of those instances by calling polling-place inspectors to ask about discrepancies between poll books and the number of ballots counted.

"The most common response when I specifically, personally called these inspectors was, 'Oh, those ballots did go through the Accu-Vote by accident.' To me it seemed like an innocent mistake, but in a close election it makes all the difference," O'Donnell said.

The other Republican, Jim Clingan, who inspected a three-precinct polling place in the lobby of a downtown Seattle apartment building, said it appeared at the end of Election Day that 30 provisional ballots had gone through the counting machine there.

Clingan said he and four election judges had trouble keeping track of voters in The Josephinum on Second Avenue because many nonvoters walked through the lobby on their way to their rooms or an adjacent restaurant.

O'Donnell and Clingan were temporary county employees who had worked on past elections.

The provisional-ballot problems are the latest in King County's troubled vote count in the closest statewide race in Washington's history.

After Democrat Christine Gregoire won a second recount over Republican Dino Rossi by 129 votes, Republicans have been sifting through voting records trying to find evidence of irregularities and fraud to justify a new election.

GOP state Chairman Chris Vance said the party also is investigating reports that ballots were received in the names of dead people and felons and that some people voted more than once.

"Given this new revelation — that King County is admitting that hundreds, maybe many, many hundreds, of ballots were cast improperly in this election and were cast into the sea of ballots where we can't get them back — Christine Gregoire should join with Dino Rossi in asking the Legislature to call a new election," he said.

Democratic Party spokeswoman Lisa Cohen said there is no reason for a revote. After losing several election-related court cases and the manual recount that put Gregoire ahead, she said, Republicans are desperate.

"The effort right now is a public-relations campaign," Cohen said. "They're throwing something against the wall and seeing what might stick."

King County Elections Director Dean Logan, who cut short a business trip to Washington, D.C., to deal with the GOP accusations, said the provisional-ballot problem has been exaggerated. "It's absolutely true that we know there were places where provisional ballots were put through Accu-Votes. There is nothing in that that indicates it was fraudulent or an intent to create havoc with the election system," Logan said.

Until workers figure out why 3,539 more votes were counted than the number of people listed as voting, Logan said, it won't be known how many provisional votes were improperly counted.

He noted, however, that more than 80 percent of the provisional ballots that went through the verification process were approved and counted. He said the total number of votes still to be accounted for is "in the realm of literally a thousandth of a percent" of all votes.

O'Donnell, one of the Republican election workers, did not say he personally witnessed provisional ballots put through voting machines, but he said 20 to 30 provisional-ballot envelopes came back empty because voters had mistakenly put their ballots through the machines. Inspectors at other polling places said they had torn up and discarded the ballot envelopes, O'Donnell said.

Jim Rigby, a Republican observer at the King County Administration Building, said Tuesday that he'd seen a voter walk into the building and put a ballot in the counting machine.

Election officials are attempting to figure out why records show more than 60 more votes cast than the number of poll voters at the administration building.

Logan criticized O'Donnell for speaking at the Republican news conference: "It's disappointing to me that someone who works in the [Records and Elections] Division would choose to address that issue in a partisan fashion."

Keith Ervin: 206-464-2105