If youâre dismissing the news this week that two Republican King County Council Members called for Election Superintendent Dean Logan to resign as just more bombastic partisanship in the governorâs election flap, thatâs wishful thinking. Loganâs predicament is for real. And, in turn, so is Gregoireâs.
At an âelection reformâ town hall meeting in Kent last week, on March 31, King County Elections chief Dean Logan made an astonishing new admission that contradicted his earlier defense of the election: âThe reconciliation documentation for this election was not up to the standard it should be.â Indeed. The âreconciliation documentsâ are supposed to tally the numbers to show that every ballot has a voter and vice versa. These reports are produced in order to prove that the person who won the election really won the election. But as Dean Logan finally confirmed what Iâve been saying for weeks, the âreconciliationsâ donât reconcile. There are still more ballots than voters.
Loganâs admission should finally signal the end of Gregoireâs reign of error. The irreconcilable reconciliation reports make it difficult for Chelan Countyâs Judge John Bridges to rule any way in the Republicanâs election challenge except that itâs impossible to know who won last Novemberâs gubernatorial race. Accordingly, Mrs. Gregoire could be tossed out of the Executive Mansion in time for Bastille Day, with a Rossi-Gregoire rematch this November.
The meltdown in King County Elections is an Enron-style accounting scandal. Enronâs financial wizards cooked up a bunch of phony-baloney accounting statements in order to conceal their embezzlements. Had Enronâs directors exercised their duty of oversight instead of ceremonially signing off on the financial statements, millions of investors and ratepayers would not have lost billions. Likewise, the King County canvassing boardâs job was to sign off on the election returns, but only after satisfying themselves that the staffâs accounting for ballots and voters actually reconciled. The canvassing board should have figured out that the numbers didnât add up. For example, this yearâs âProvisional Ballot Reportâ covered up the roughly 700 unverified provisional ballots that illegally went into the ballot box. And on April 1, Dean Logan followed up the Town Hall meeting with startling news that confirms just how fictitious the reconciliation reports actually were. His staff found 87 (eventually 93) more absentee ballots that werenât counted in November. These votes should have been flagged in Novemberâs âMail Ballot Reportâ (a part of the absentee-ballot reconciliation report) to the canvassing board, which purported to account for every absentee voter and their ballots.
By now, even Christine Gregoire must be embarrassed by the funny numbers that put her in the Governorâs Office. As attorney general, Gregoire wrote this in her 2002 Seattle Post-Intelligencer op-ed about the widespread harm caused by Enronâs accounting fraud: âprepare yourself for the new mathâEnron math. The theory is simple: Any way you tally the numbers, they donât add up for Northwest residents.â
Any reasonable person who does the math should reach the same conclusion about the Enron-style numbers in the governorâs race: They donât add up and they donât tell us who really won. Itâs hard to imagine a reasonable judge could rule otherwise, or that a reasonable former attorney general could disagree.