"Our goal this election is to build voter confidence," exhorted instructor Barnaby Dow at the outset of my poll-worker training session last week. After chronicling last year's fiasco of illegal voting on my blog, I volunteered to spend two days this fall as a poll judge, doing my own bit to restore integrity to the system. Building voter confidence is a goal for County Executive Ron Sims too, being that he is chiefly responsible for the collapse of voter confidence in the first place. But judging from my training session, Sims's team still has a ways to go.

I realized the training might miss the mark when Dow's only specific suggestion for building confidence was to be "courteous and respectful." It wasn't reports of discourteous poll workers that undermined voter confidence, though. It was that Sims's Elections Department accepted ballots from hundreds of unlawful voters in November. Unfortunately, on this matter the training was incomplete and incorrect. It didn't mention the poll judge's legal oath, which states that the paramount obligation is to prevent ineligible votes and "make a true and perfect return" of the election.

There is a formal procedure for the poll judge to challenge a questionable voter's ballot and allow the canvassing board to determine eligibility. I would expect guidelines on when it might be appropriate to challenge a voter, e.g. "no longer lives here." But this wasn't in any handout and it wasn't mentioned in the lecture until I asked about it. Dow strongly dissuaded us from performing this duty, joking that the envelope with the challenge forms is like the nuclear missile launch code envelope. He even implied incorrectly that we had no choice but to accept a voter's ID, even if we have sound doubts about its validity. He seemed surprised when I informed him after class that state law actually requires the judges to safeguard against unlawful votes.

I later discovered that Barnaby Dow isn't an experienced elections person. He's a member of Sims's own staff and enough of a team player to have donated $700 to Sims's recent campaigns—even though he's only here on a temporary engagement and still votes back home in Alaska.

Could it be that Sims's people are doing what they've falsely accused opponents of doing—gaming the polling place for partisan advantage? Sims's chief of staff was quoted in the August 10 Seattle Weekly revealing that I applied to be a poll worker, insinuating that this was unusual, as if part of a Republican scheme to "monkey-wrench the primary."

By state law, both major parties assign poll judges at every election. I was training so I could fill that role for my party. After completing the inadequate training, it seems to me that the Republicans aren't the ones doing the "monkey-wrenching."

There are other signs of this. For decades, King County has had two Democrats and two Republicans working in the elections office to fill vacant poll-worker positions so as to ensure a fair bipartisan balance at the polls. A couple weeks ago Dean Logan denied the Republicans their traditional participation in filling poll assignments, delegating the task exclusively to county workers and Democrats.

Stefan Sharkansky founded the local conservative politics blog www.soundpolitics.org