Logan's testimony one-upped the predictions I made in my last Sound Bite column [April 14]. I was about to get county records that I expected would prove that more ballots were counted in November than were cast by voters.
But instead of a precise accounting showing more ballots than voters, the accounting was revealed to be such a mess that there was effectively no accounting at all. Logan confirmed as much in his testimony and also admitted enough other improprieties that King County's handling of the 2004 election can be fairly characterized as a fraud. You heard it here first: A new gubernatorial election now appears inevitable.
Had the November election been properly managed, county officials would be able to document that each of the 565,014 absentee ballots they counted was cast by an actual voter and that no extra ballots were, say, tossed into the pile by an overzealous employee. But county ballot records fall into two groups: those that show that more ballots were counted than there were voters, and those that are so incomplete as to be worthless.
Among the most damning evidence are the "batch slips," which track the bundles of incoming ballots from signature verification to tabulation. The batch slips are 2004's hanging chads--conclusive proof of an inconclusive election. They show that hundreds of ballots were lost before they were tabulated. Ninety-four of those uncounted ballots, mostly from Republican precincts, were eventually discovered in a county warehouse five months after the election. Hundreds of other ballots appeared out of nowhere, as if by miracle, and were tabulated anyway. Finally, the audit trail, required by state rules to document every one of the absentee ballots issued, fails to account for at least 10,000 of the ballots that were supposedly processed.
Logan also described examples of comically lax ballot security. The elections office has a "ballot-on-demand" printer that didn't keep track of how many ballots it printed. We'll never know how many of these on-demand ballots were part of the surge of hundreds of new Gregoire ballots that magically appeared in the recounts.
Dino Rossi's spokeswoman Mary Lane says last week's revelations support Rossi's claim that "things were such a complete mess in King County that nobody can say with certainty who won the election." It's hard to see how a fair judge could disagree. On the other hand, the Democrats are uncharacteristically silent. State Democratic Party Chairman Paul Berendt even broke his promise to get back to me with an official comment on Logan's testimony. Perhaps he's busy devising a brand new set of talking points. Even the feckless Democrats will eventually have to stop defending the indefensibly tainted election and find a believable message for marketing Mrs. Gregoire.
As for Dean Logan, he would do well to return to the pre-elections career he mentioned in his deposition--department store shoe salesman.
