Posted on 02/09/2005 2:59:22 PM PST by swilhelm73
King County Executive Ron Sims, holding his first press conference on problems with the Nov. 2 election, said this morning he plans to ask the County Council for more money to buy a new election facility and improve training of workers.
Despite his acknowledgement that some changes are needed, Sims defended Elections Director Dean Logan and came out swinging at those who have questioned the integrity of the election.
"I am deeply disappointed that so many have sought to take political advantage of human error and turn it into baseless cries of fraud and corruption," Sims said.
Sims and Logan shared the podium as they released Logan's 24-page report on the election. The report outlined reforms that are needed at the state and local levels, but provided little new information about a series of errors that have undermined public confidence in King County's election results.
Those errors included the mailing of duplicate ballots to some absentee voters; the mistaken rejection of some absentee ballots cast by voters whose signatures weren't found in a computer system; and the improper counting of some provisional ballots before the eligibility of the voters was verified.
"A thousand things went right," Sims said, "but a handful of things went wrong. Some mistakes were made, and we all regret that.
"But with every mistake we accepted responsibility, informed the public and, most importantly, took swift corrective action to ensure that every eligible ballot was counted."
Sims said a postcard will be sent to all King County residents, telling them how they can obtain the report.
He also said the search has begun for a property where the county can combine its now-scattered election operations into a single "state-of-the-art" facility.
Logan said he plans to create a "formalized" staff training program, update work procedures, beef up security, and build a "fully functional" communications center.
After Sims praised the county's "99.98 percent" accuracy in handling votes, he was asked what that number was based on. Logan said it was based in part on a discrepancy of 1,800 between ballots counted and voters known to have voted.
However, when that discrepancy was compared with the nearly 900,000 votes counted, blogger Stefan Sharkansky pointed out to Logan, the accuracy rate was actually 99.8 percent.
Saw an add on TV this morning where a guy from a bank talked about check processing. He said one error in a million is unacceptable. We need to outsource this to a bank!
And this is just like Sims. ANYTHING goes wrong on his watch and he's right there to ask for more money.
http://www.soundpolitics.com/archives/003732.html
King County Whitewash
(Stefan Sharkansky) attended this morning's press conference with King County Executive Ron Sims and Elections Director Dean Logan.
It was an attempt at whitewash and it backfired. Big time. Another nail in the coffin not only of this disastrous election but also for King Sims career. The purpose of the conference was to release Logan's "2004 Election Report to Ron Sims", on the web here. The prepared text of Sims' remarks is here, a press release is here. Here are some highlights of the press conference.
so what if it wasn't fair or accurate. (sorry about that Chris G!)
Next, time please include a "Barf Alert." Thank you.
Why does Sims want money for election training? I thought everything went just great in King County. Isn't that what he said earlier today?
He's a lefty liberal loon and to him, money grows on trees!
http://josef-a-k.blogspot.com/2005/02/communism-has-landed-in-king-county.html has my thoughts on all of this.
LOL! You read my mind!
PING & BTTT
Yes and that includes his looney liberal legislator friends in Olympia where everyday they think of a new way to dig into our pockets. On top of that we can't even get an accounting of where the money goes!
HaHAhah! It does grows on trees. Your trees, but he controls 65% of them!
http://www.seattleaudubon.org/Conservation/ActionAlerts/AA_Critical_Areas_Ordinance.asp
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