Monitoring addresses "high burden," elections director says

Republican charges that the King County elections office doesn't police voter-registration addresses closely enough are unreasonable, the state elections director says.

"It's a pretty high burden to place on a county, especially a county the size of King," Nick Handy said Monday.

Meanwhile, the King County Canvassing Board resumed hearings Monday night on whether to count the ballots of about 180 voters who voted in the Nov. 8 election but whose registrations have been challenged by a top county Republican.

Elections office spokeswoman Bobbie Egan said rulings on some challenges are likely today. The 180 are among more than 1,900 county voters whose registrations were challenged Oct. 26 by Lori Sotelo, a vice chair of the King County GOP. Republican leaders said at the time that all were registered illegally at addresses that are private mailbox businesses or storage complexes, and they criticized county Elections Director Dean Logan and his staff for not catching them.

Sotelo since has withdrawn 175 challenges, admitting they were filed in error, but the registration addresses of most of the challenged voters appear to be nonresidential, as Republicans have charged.

State law requires voters to register at the addresses where they live. The elections office does screen and set aside registrations with addresses that use "P.O. Box" or "PMB" (private mailbox), but voters whose registrations were challenged didn't use those terms. Instead, most used the street addresses of the businesses where they registered.

Logan has said it would be arbitrary to question voters about their addresses in more detail to determine if they are residences. Handy said King and other large counties simply lack the resources.

"If there's no 'flag' [such as a P.O. Box or PMB], it's a pretty high burden to expect a county to be on top of each situation like this," the state elections director said. "It's really not reasonable to expect that of a county. ... I think this becomes a resource issue, myself."

That's no excuse, said King County Republican Chairman Michael Young. "There's nothing more important in a democracy than elections," he said.

Young also noted that, before Logan's arrival, King County had a program to correct voter registrations at nonresidential addresses.

Snohomish County also doesn't screen registrations to weed out nonresidential addresses, Auditor Bob Terwilliger said. There's no foolproof way to ensure an address isn't a residence, he said.

Spokane County, in contrast, has had a program since about 2001 to catch voters who register at private mailbox businesses, Auditor Vicky Dalton said. But Dalton said elections officials aren't required by law to do such screening, and her office took it on only after addressing more serious problems first.

Handy said he wants to honor the process King County is following in considering each challenge. But he also is concerned large-scale challenges like Sotelo's, which he called "overly broad," could intimidate some voters.

"I wish that we'd had more homework done before we started," he said, alluding to the numerous mistaken GOP challenges, "because we've left a bad taste in a lot of voters' mouths."

Handy's boss, Secretary of State Sam Reed, is a Republican, but has been on the outs with many in the GOP for failing to side with them in challenging Democrat Christine Gregoire's narrow victory over Republican Dino Rossi in last year's gubernatorial race.

State GOP Chairman Chris Vance has charged that Gregoire won only because of illegal votes in King County.

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