Glitch surfaces amid talk of ballot security

An hourlong presentation on improvements at King County Elections yesterday was followed by a mini-investigation into another mistake the office made this summer.

The office mailed three voter-registration cards to Crystal McNey within 12 days of each other — she says she received them all on the same day. Just six months earlier, McNey said, she had gone to the elections office to report that she had received two absentee ballots in November's troubled election.

She thought the problem had been fixed. So how did this latest record-keeping problem happen?

That's what county Elections Director Dean Logan was asked during yesterday's questioning by the Metropolitan King County Council. When Councilman Reagan Dunn, R-Bellevue, produced McNey's three registration cards, Logan said: "I'm anxious to see that so we can actually address it."

When his staff members looked into it after the meeting, they found that the mix-up occurred when McNey married a member of Dunn's campaign staff and changed her name last year. Elections-office spokeswoman Brooke Bascom said the office mistakenly mailed her two cards — one with her maiden name and one with her married name — in June. But when the office discovered the duplication, it fixed its records, Bascom said, and mailed out a corrected card.

When told later of the elections office's explanation, Dunn said he didn't buy it. He said it's confusing for McNey to get three cards in the mail, regardless of whether the problem is now fixed in King County's database.

"It underscores the very serious problem we have with our voter rolls and updating our voter rolls," he said.

Logan's presentation at a special council meeting focused on the tighter security to protect ballots and more-consistent procedures that will be in place for the Sept. 20 primary.

But the confrontational atmosphere yesterday was a reminder that Logan's job is on the line.

The embattled elections director was contrite, apologizing for problems that were exposed in the aftermath of the closest governor's election in state history.

Last year was "certainly a wake-up call," he said, adding: "There was no one who was more sorry or frustrated ... than me."

When asked about a "turnaround team" recommended to oversee his office, Logan said he couldn't comment without knowing who would serve on it.

He said he was focused on the Sept. 20 primary election and couldn't comment on the team, which was recommended by the Independent Task Force on Elections.

"I think that would really depend on who that turnaround team was, whether they had experience and expertise in running elections," he said.

Logan and County Executive Ron Sims have faced criticism for being unwilling to turn over the elections office to the turnaround team, though Sims said last week that the team will observe the primary and decide whether Logan keeps his job after the election.

Yesterday, Logan tried to keep the focus on his improvements, which include removing 850 felons and 6,500 dead voters from the voter rolls, changing the way provisional ballots look so they won't get mixed up with other ballots and punching holes in absentee-ballot envelopes to make sure no ballots are left uncounted.

After the meeting, County Councilman David Irons, R-Sammamish, who is running against Sims this fall for county executive, released a statement calling the changes "window dressing" and Logan's changes "more excuses and more delays."

King County Elections spokeswoman Bobbie Egan said Irons' statement came out so quickly after the presentation that he clearly had drafted it before.

"Our response would be that the conclusions he drew were drawn prior to our presentation today," she said.

Emily Heffter: 206-464-8246 or eheffter@seattletimes.com