King County vote count off by more than 3,700 votes

Sound Politics ^ | 1-24-05 | Stefan Sharkansky

[Seattle Conservative]

I've finished the massive project of trying to reconcile the King County voter list to the vote count as accurately as humanly possible. My conclusion: their numbers are off by at least 3,748 votes, or roughly 30 times former Attorney General Gregoire's alleged "victory" margin.

The previously reported discrepancy of 2,150 (348 unverified provisionals + 1,800 unexplained more ballots than voters) represents only the net difference between ballots and voters. While many precincts counted more ballots than voters, a lot of precincts counted more voters than ballots. When you add up all the voterless ballots and all the ballotless voters, the true number of improperly counted votes reaches at least 3,700 and is presumably somewhat higher.

These are the issues I had to deal with given the state of the data that King County delivered.

1) The latest voter file (Jan. 7) had been updated to reflect changes to the registration rolls since the election. In order to get precinct information that was correct as of election day, I used precinct information from the Nov. 1 file. The 557 magical mystery voters who were in the Jan. 7, but not the Nov. 1 were counted in the precincts recorded in the Jan. 7 file.

2) I recovered the records of 253 voters who were listed in the Dec. 29 file, but had been dropped by Jan. 7.

3) I removed the 636 duplicate records that the County included in the Jan. 7 file.

4) For whatever reason, the 566 magical "Larry Phillips" ballots that were counted by the canvassing board on the last day of the manual recount were not added to the precinct totals in the Manual Recount Canvass file. They were listed as a separate line item called "Canvass Additions". In order to include these ballots in precinct totals, I obtained from the County the list of the voters in question and added their votes to the precinct counts based on their precinct assignments as of Nov. 1.

5) I found in my earlier analysis of ballots vs. voters by precinct that a lot of the discrepancies could be explained by polling places. Ballots that should have been counted in one precinct were counted in a different precinct that shared the same polling place. This is still a problem, but more innocent than some of the other explanations for ballotless voters and voterless ballots. In order to factor out this less serious error, I totaled ballots and voters by polling place. The County failed to satisfy my request for a clean list of precincts and polling places, so I took this PDF file of polling places, converted to text and manually corrected for variations in spelling.

6) I noticed that within polling places, polling ballots appeared to be misattributed to provisional voters and vice versa. Another problem that if not excusable also does not imply there are illegitamate ballots being counted. I rolled up provisional and polling ballots into a single category per polling place.

7) Finally, the Manual Recount Precinct Canvass, unlike the canvasses for the two earlier counts, does not make separate counts of absentee, precinct and polling ballots. I used the counts of each type of ballot per precinct from the machine recount, but the precinct total from the manual recount, realizing that the totals would still be off by 1 or 2 in some precincts. (In addition to the 566 "Larry Phillips" ballots, there were also 266 ballots that disappeared and 325 ballots that magically appeared between the machine and manual recounts, for a net change of 59 brand new ballots)

After all of that, I found the following total discrepancies between ballots and voters: Polling Place Absentee Polling/Provisional Voterless Ballots 1,267 1,975 Ballotless Voters (485) (341) For a total of 4,068 ballots that either undercount or overcount the number of identified voters. 320 of the voterless ballots can be explained by the unregistered military and Address Confidentiality Program voters who don't appear in the voter rolls. So we're left with 3,748 miscounted ballots.

I still consider this number a lower bound on the number of miscounted ballots, because (a) it doesn't take into account the unexplained net increase in ballots in the manual recount, and (b) the roll-up of absentee ballots by polling place was a convenience for these calculations, although I can't think of any plausible reason why absentee ballots should ever be mixed up between precincts, even within the same polling place (When I summed absentees by precinct and not by polling place, I found a total of 1,980 voterless ballots and 1,198 ballotless voters), and (c) there are likely to unnoticed discrepancies of missing ballots and missing voters within precincts, even if they're masked by the net total for the precinct.

The following tables show the hall of shame of polling places with the largest discrepancies between ballots and voters. The numbers in the Absentee, Polling, Provisional columns represent the number of extra ballots/missing voters [in black] or missing ballots/extra voters [in (red)] of the various types of ballots. The "Total" column is not the total of these three ballot types, but is the difference between the total precinct count for the manual recount and total number of identified precinct voters. [as per item (7) above]

The "imputed lead" column estimates how much the miscounted ballots might have added to (subtracted from) Gregoire's lead, based on how the other ballots at that polling place broke to the various candidates. It's true that the net affect of the missing ballots was to reduce Gregoire's lead, but they didn't appear to hurt her nearly as much as the extra ballots seemed to help her. Top 5 polling places with more ballots than voters

Polling Place City Absentee Provisional Polling Total Imputed Lead

King Co Adm Bldg, 500 4 AV Seattle 1 64 1 65 27.6

Bell Tower, 2215 1 AV Seattle 26 (5) 21 42 17.7

Denny Terrace, 100 MELROSE AV E Seattle 3 (2) 39 41 29.8

The Josephinum, 1902 2 AV Seattle 3 (5) 39 40 15.8

Rainier Free Meth Ch, 5900 RAINIER AV S Seattle 1 5 34 40 21.8

Also notable is Ashton Hall, Sea Pac Univ, 611 W DRAVIS ST, Seattle, which wins the prize for counting the next largest number of absentee ballots for which there is no known voter -- 25.

In all fairness, I'll suggest the possibility that some of these polling places may be disproportionately associated with the unregistered military voters and the address confidentiality voters, whose ballots are assigned to a precinct, but whose voters are not identified even by number per precinct. But that can only explain so much. 95 out of about 600 polling places show a net of at least 10 more ballots than voters.

But as fair as I can be, I can't come up with a good explanation for precincts that have more voters than ballots. Top 5 polling places with more voters than ballots

Polling Place City Absentee Provisional Polling Total Imputed Lead

Clark Elementary, 500 2 AV SE Issaquah (10) (16) 12 (14) 1.5

Ballard House, 2445 NW 57 ST Seattle (7) (4) (2) (11) 6.3

Martin Sortun Elementary, 12711 SE 248 ST Kent (5) (7) 1 (10) 1.1

Ravenna Eckstein Comm Ctr, 6535 RAVENNA AV NE Seattle (10) (2) 4 (9) 5.7

Bennett School, 17900 NE 16 ST Bellevue (5) 0 (2) (8) 0.7

The bottom line? The imputed lead for all of the mismatches between ballots and identified voters was 649. That calculation is based on the fact that the unidentified voters includes the unregistered military and ACP voters, who can't be easily subtracted from this number. But in all probability, the number of extra votes that Gregoire picked up from the various extra ballots and missing ballots is hundreds more than her margin of "victory".

[Ciexyz]

Most interesting.

[Eva]

The Democrat legislature is desperate to hold on to the govenor's office to avoid a Republican govenor from vetoing their leftist plans. First on the agenda is the California style emission controls which would result in California gas formulation and defacto approval of the Kyoto Treaty for the Western US.

I can't believe that I have not been able to raise any concern about this legislation from the WA Freepers. The effects of this will go far beyond our state borders because the gas for five western states is refined in Whatcom County.

[MHGinTN]

"... before the court can order a revote which will send her career to the gallows." Dream on ... the democrap party is not going to allow their fraudulent results to be overturned and they depend on their liberal leftist judges to protect them. fuggedaboutit, Rossi is history and ludi-Chris is now in power.

[litehaus]

"The effects of this will go far beyond our state borders"

Just like Bloomberg in NYC lettgin gun makers be sued....repercussions way beyond the (apparent) local intent.......

[Eva]

Oh, the original intent of the California emission rules for Washington state is indeed to spread the enviro/political repurcussions beyond the state borders. The intent of this legislation is defacto approval of Kyoto. BP has already come out in favor of the Kyoto treaty.

[swilhelm73]

bttt

[writer33]

Thanks for the ping!

[farmfriend]

This vote fraud has got to stop.

[writer33]

Yep. This has reached ridiculous levels. And it's all right because a Democrat won. The third count had to have been right. That's their attitude.

[Vicki]

Excellent work Stefan and much appreciated.

[farmfriend]

The third count had to have been right.

Unless it's Bush winning in Ohio. Shows them to be very two faced doesn't it.

[writer33]

Unless it's Bush winning in Ohio. Shows them to be very two faced doesn't it.

When did this happen? I'm shocked. :)

[Hank Rearden]

fuggedaboutit, Rossi is history and ludi-Chris is now in power.

Don't be so sure about that. We're makin' history here.

[E.G.C.]

BTTT!!!!!!!

[hripka]

SOURCE: http://www.conservativeaction.org/resources.php3?nameid=votefraud

How Democrats Steal Elections - Top 10 Methods of Liberal Vote Fraud

1. Over-Voting. In Democrat strongholds like St. Louis, Philadelphia and Detroit, some precincts had 100% of their registered voters voting, with 99% of the ballots going to Gore. Clearly, multiple voting resulted in extra tallies for Gore in the 2000 election. (New York Post, 12/09/00).

2. Dead Voters. This classic Democratic method of vote fraud goes all the way back to 1960 in Chicago and Dallas. The 2000 election was no exception. In Miami-Dade County, for example, some of the 144 ineligible votes (those which officials actually admitted to) were cast by dead people, including a Haitian-American who's been deceased since 1977 (Miami-Herald, 12/24/00).

3. Mystery Voters. These "voters" cast votes anyway but are not even registered to vote. In heavily Democratic Broward County, for example, more than 400 ballots were cast by non-registered voters. (Miami-Herald 1/09/01)

4. Military ballots. Many of these votes were disqualified for the most mundane and trivial reasons. At least 1,527 valid military ballots were discarded in Florida by Democratic vote counters (Drudge Report, 11/19/00).

5. Criminals. Felons are a natural Democratic voter and they're protected on voter rolls across the country. In Florida at least 445 ex-convicts - including rapists and murderers -- voted illegally on November 7th. Nearly all of them were registered Democrats. (Miami-Herald 12/01/00)

6. Illegal aliens. These voters have long been a core liberal constituency, especially in California. In Orange County in 1996, Rep. Bob Dornan had his congressional seat stolen from him when thousands of illegal aliens voted for Loretta Sanchez (Christian Science Monitor, 9/2/97).

7. Vote-buying. Purchasing votes has long been a traditional scheme by Democrats, and not just with money. In the 2000 election in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Democratic workers initiate a "smokes-for-votes" campaign in which they paid dozens of homeless men with cigarettes if they cast ballots for Al Gore (Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, 11/14/00).

8. Phantom Voters. These voters don't really exist, but their ballots do. In the 1996 Lousiana Senate race, GOP candidate Woody Jenkins had the election stolen from him when he discovered that 7,454 actual votes were cast but had no paper trail to authenticate them (Behind the Headlines, F.R. Duplantier, 4/27/97).

9. Dimpled chads. Those infamous punch-cards were a ballot bonanza for Al Gore. Democratic poll workers in Palm Beach, Dade and Broward counties tampered and manipulated thousands of ineligible ballots and counted them for Gore, even though no clear vote could be discerned. (NewsMax.com 11/27, 12/22, 11/18, 11/19/00).

10. Absentee ballots. Normally it's assumed that Republicans benefit from absentee ballots. But in the case of Miami's 1997 mayoral election, hundreds of absentee ballots were made for sale or sent out to non-Miami residents. Fraud was so extensive in the race that the final results were overturned in court (FL Dept. of Law Enforcement Report, 1/5/98)."

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/keyword?k=votefraud

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/keyword?k=electionfraud

[Alamo-Girl]

Thanks for the ping!

[supercat]

Perhaps someone needs to codify into law that it is the duty of the government to show by a preponderance of the evidence that an election is valid; failure to provide such evidence may be a basis for throwing an election out.

In any properly-run election, there should be boatloads of evidence for legitimacy. Bunches of records that cross-check with so few unexplainable discrepancies that they fall below the margin of error.

In this case, though, King County is unable to offer a list of people who voted, nor offer any explanation of why such a list is not yet available and what reasons there would be to think it correct if/when it ever appears.

If King County were to release a list immediately after the election which was incomplete, but stated that was because some registration forms which were in a double-locked safe to which a trusted Republican and trusted Democrat held the key had not yet been processed, but those forms would be processed shortly under chain-of-custody rules, that might be trustworthy. But the current baloney!?