GOP may need to find homes of contested voters

The outcome of hundreds of Republican voter-registration challenges may hinge not only on whether the GOP can demonstrate the voters are registered at private mailbox businesses rather than actual residences.

It may also turn on whether the party can say where those voters do live.

That prospect surfaced Thursday night as the King County Canvassing Board considered the first batch of more than 1,900 challenges a county Republican activist filed less than two weeks before the Nov. 8 election.

The board weighed whether to count votes cast by 34 GOP-challenged voters in last week's election. The board members are county elections director Dean Logan, Metropolitan King County Councilman Dow Constantine, D-Seattle, and Dan Satterberg, County Prosecutor Norm Maleng's chief of staff.

No decisions were made. Hearings on an additional 167 challenged ballots are scheduled Monday and Tuesday.

State law requires voters register at addresses where they live. But in a letter to Logan Wednesday, Democratic Party lawyer David McDonald argued the law also requires that challengers provide voters' real residential addresses as well as the addresses they are challenging.

Republican lawyers disagreed. Canvassing Board members seemed to take the question seriously, however, asking Lori Sotelo, the Republican activist who filed the challenges, whether she could provide each challenged voter's actual home address.

In some cases, she could. In many instances, she couldn't.

Sotelo challenged the registrations of 1,944 voters Oct. 26, charging all were registered illegally at private mailbox businesses or storage complexes. Republicans said the challenges were evidence that the county's voter-registration rolls are a mess, and that Logan and his boss, County Executive Ron Sims, aren't doing their jobs.

Democrats countered that the challenges were attempts to intimidate or disenfranchise voters and score political points against Sims, a Democrat who won re-election last week.

The GOP later acknowledged many of the challenges were mistaken. So far Sotelo has withdrawn 155, and Diane Tebelius, one of her attorneys, said Thursday night that about 20 of the 167 scheduled for hearings next week likely would be pulled.

Many voters challenged erroneously live in homes or apartments at storage complexes they manage; others live at addresses similar to private mailbox businesses or storage complexes.

A Seattle Times review indicates most of the remaining voters whose registrations have been challenged are registered at mailboxes or storage complexes, as Republicans say.

The canvassing board had originally scheduled hearings on 48 challenges Thursday; GOP withdrawals trimmed the list to 34. Five voters showed up in person; four sent statements.

All nine admitted they are registered at addresses where they rent private mailboxes. The boxes can't be residences, Tebelius argued, because "they're not even big enough to put one's head in."

Challenged voter Teri Carpenter said she's registered at a private mailbox in Redmond because it "has just been a stable part of my life." She said she travels a lot and now is living in a recreational vehicle in Carnation.

She called the Republican challenges "a huge waste of time."

But King County GOP spokeswoman Fawn Spady said later that Carpenter's case illustrates Republican concerns. While Carpenter wasn't intent on fraud, Spady said, she nevertheless was eligible to vote in Redmond city races even though she lives in Carnation.

"We just want the voter rolls to be clean," Spady said. She said Sotelo has received death threats since the challenges were filed.

Another voter, registered at a private mailbox business in Issaquah, said he is bipolar and often homeless, and sometimes lives in his car outside the business. He confronted Sotelo, saying she didn't know his circumstances, and that it was humiliating to have to explain them in public.

"This just isn't right," the voter said. "This [election law] was not meant as a tool for the Republican Party. ... This is not the 1950s, where black people were asked to take a reading test to vote."

There are other, legal ways for homeless people to register, Tebelius answered.

The elections office screens and sets aside registrations with addresses that use "P.O. Box" or "PMB" but doesn't examine street addresses voters provide to make certain they are residences. It used to, but Logan has said he ended the practice because "I was uncomfortable with the arbitrary nature of that and our authority to do it."

Eric Pryne: 206-464-2231 or epryne@seattletimes.com