Crossposted at
Preemptive Karma:
In my ongoing effort to sort out the accusations vs the realities in the Washington Governor Election, I've switched my focus from the military ballots issue to the latest GOP crying game, ballot/voter discrepancies.
As I posted the other day, the latest attempts to throw stuff on the wall to see if it sticks is under the guise of discrepancies in King County between the number of ballots cast and the number of people credited with voting.
I spoke this week with Bill Huennekens from the King County Elections office. Huennekens told me that each precinct has a book where voters sign in when they show up to vote. Those books are what King County uses to attempt to reconcile ballots to voters.
(more below the fold)
As far as I can tell, this would be the only definitive way to reconcile the ballots/credited voters. These books can be viewed by the public, but only by going into the King County offices. They're not viewable online, which makes the "definitive analysis" by Republican hack
Stefan Sharkansy of Sound Politics, worth less than the pixels it was put together with.
According to Huennekens, King County has 540 polling locations and 2616 precincts. As it stands, the voter/ballot discrepancy is at 1800 more ballots than credited voters. That's equivalent to less than one ballot per precinct.
What could cause such an imbalance? One answer, voter error.
Voters who are given provisional ballots are also given a special envelope in which to place them. These provisional voters are flagged in the sign in book. After voting provisionally, voters are supposed to put the ballot in the special envelope and return it to the poll workers. If a provisional voter neglected to do this and instead put their ballot into the machine, the count is off.
The count is also thrown off by poll worker error. This happens most often when workers don't get voters properly signed into the precinct poll book. Huennekens informed me that works are given training, but humans do make errors.
Are King Counties discrepancies out of line with what goes on in other counties in Washington? What about other places around the US?
I've teamed up with Joe from Also Also to work on the answer. Joe has a post today about our initial efforts.
We'll both be keeping you up to date as we progress.