A look at the 3 other candidates

Who are the other three candidates for King County elections director?

Here are some things you might want to know.

"I am an outsider, absolutely — the definition of the word," says Bill Anderson, of Auburn. "When you open up the dictionary and look up outsider, there's Bill's picture there."

But he says his experience in the banking industry — at one point overseeing seven vice presidents and 1,300 workers who processed 3 million checks a day — would be of use to a technology-dependent elections office.

Christopher Clifford, of Renton, a high-school teacher who once ran a high-school teacher who once ran Jerseys All American Sports Bar in Seattle, claims incumbent Sherril Huff failed to move to King County before she filed as a candidate.

Now the state Public Disclosure Commission is warning Clifford it will schedule a penalty hearing on his failure to file two required public-disclosure forms after he became a candidate.

Julie Kempf, of Seattle, was fired as elections superintendent for allegedly lying about why ballots were mailed late to voters in the November 2002 election. She denied the accusation.

The King County Sheriff's Office in 2005 investigated suspicions that she created fake e-mails to shift the blame for the ballot foul-up from herself to others in the elections office.

A sheriff's detective recommended that criminal charges be filed, but the state attorney general declined to prosecute.

Keith Ervin: 206-464-2105 or kervin@seattletimes.com

Information in this article, originally published January 30, 2009, was corrected February 2, 2009. A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that the city of Seattle once shut down a bar operated by Christopher Clifford, a candidate for King County elections director. Clifford's establishment, Jerseys All American Sports Bar, remained open but stopped offering hip-hop music after enforcement actions in 1992 by the city and the state Liquor Control Board. A federal judge later ruled that the law used against Jerseys violated the owner's free-speech rights.