Posted on 12/17/2004 11:52:39 AM PST by kattracks
SEATTLE (AP) — With Washington state in the middle of a recount of its amazingly close governor's race, election officials in Seattle's King County entered a warehouse Friday and found a plastic tray containing 150 misplaced ballots.The discovery brings the number of belatedly discovered ballots to 723 in the heavily Democratic county — potentially enough to swing the election to Democrat Christine Gregoire.
Republican Dino Rossi won the Nov. 2 election over Gregoire by 261 votes in the first count and by just 42 after a machine recount of the 2.9 million ballots cast. On Thursday, with every county except King, Pierce and Spokane reporting, Rossi had pulled ahead by 74 votes.
The Republican Party went to court Friday to try to block, for the time being, the opening of those ballots. A judge set an afternoon hearing.
King County Elections Director Dean Logan told The Seattle Times that the ballots in the tray, like the 573 other ballots found earlier this week, were mistakenly rejected because there was a problem with how the voters' signatures had been scanned into the county's computer system. The tray apparently was left behind and forgotten in the warehouse, Logan said.
Election workers, along with observers from the political parties, searched the locked cage inside the warehouse.
The search of the warehouse was prompted by a curious finding: None of the envelopes of the 573 other ballots contained names beginning with the letters A or B, and only two started with C, The Times reported.
King County election officials want to count the ballots, which they say are valid votes. Republicans want those ballots to stay rejected — or at the very least, they want King County to investigate further before adding them to the mix.
(Excerpt) Read more at nj.com ...
WOW! What a rip off!! The rats are pulling the carpet from right under the pubs noses!! WHAT CAN BE DONE? Have I told you all lately how much I LOATHE the RATS?!!!
since both houses in the state legislature are Democrat, its unlikely that anything will be done...they will simply fortifiy themselves with even more crooked judges and election boards...
now with the referendum, maybe......
the Democrat party is the party of evil and arrogant tyrants...period...
I know her (a little, tiny bit) and trust her too. She's a treasure.
Hmmm now where did the DNC tell me I could expect to find those ballots. . .
In case not yet answered: for absentee ballots, the outside envelope has to have the voter's name, address, and signature for matching purposes with the voter registration rolls. Once the signatures are verified, the outer envelope is separated and the vote becomes anonymous (in a perfect world of unfraudulent polling practices).
That is why the GOP is so hot to stop the handling and counting of these ballots. Once they are removed from their envelopes and shuffled into the overall count, you can't locate them to extract them if the signatures turn out to be unvalidatable.
And clearly the presumably Democrat/Socialist election commisioner is being fired and held criminally liable for utterly failing to perform his or her responsibilities, right? They did over see the "disenfranchisement" of hundreds of their voters.
It will have to be by referendum, but there WILL be pay back. King County will get nothing passed that is not revoked by referendum, if it calls for statewide funding.
Why are you even here? You appear to know nothing about th topic being discussed, nor about the elections in this state...
GOP hearing on NWCN-TV or Streaming at NWCN.com
Perhaps the best sarcastic comment I have read about the Washington State Election!
BUMP Blatant Fraud, that is!
The assholes in Washington deserve this fiasco.
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It's not all of Warshington. It's only the part west of Lake Warshington. (dang it, i keep forgetting, the "r" is silent)
No doubt you consistently applied this logic to the Clinton elections too.
"Oh! How could it be we only mistakenly found bad signatures from D to Z" "We need to check in this warehouse to find the A's and B's, after all every name in the alphabet would have been mistakenly fradulent." < /sarcasm off >
This would make Huey Long and Lyndon Johnson blush.
Are all the judges Democrats, too?
Absentee ballots, and provisional ballots as well, are verified as being from registered voters before they are opened; thus the name, address and voter information has to be on the outside of the envelope.
A point I've not seen mentioned anywhere is that even though this county is overrun with 'rats, absentee ballots have often tended toward the conservative candidate, which initially might have influenced the decision to reject the absentee ballots and not ask any questions.
There were probably at least a few. Maybe Zell Miller's election?
Excuse me but I live in Washington, I vote, I care deeply about my state, and I am not a donkey's rear.
We Republicans suffer daily from the democrat death grip on our state.
We keep trying to turn things around.
Residence and Republicanism do not make us donkeys' rears, neither do they make us deserving of this corruption.
In related news, BlueNGold walked into his garage Friday and found a box containing 987 uncounted ballots from King County Wash that somehow had been sent UPS to his house. He immediately requested that the State of Washington send the new PS2 he ordered, at which tme he would release the ballots. A response from King County officials was pending at the time of this report...
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