Ballot Tracking Flawed, Washington Supervisor Testifies

The mail-ballot supervisor in Washington state’s most populous county testified Wednesday that she raised concerns about the county’s inability to track ballots months before last year’s disputed governor’s race.

The supervisor, Nicole Way, said she repeatedly told her bosses as early as spring 2004 that the King County elections department couldn’t tell how many ballots were being mailed out or received back.

About two-thirds of the county’s 900,000 votes in November were cast by mail.

She testified on the third day of a trial in the GOP’s challenge to the governor’s race, which Christine Gregoire, a Democrat, won by 129 votes on the third count.

The Republicans are trying to prove that election errors and fraud stole the victory from Dino Rossi. They want Chelan County Superior Court Judge John Bridges to nullify Gregoire’s victory, and they want and a new election.

Under questioning by GOP attorney Harry Korrell, Way said she and other workers tried to create a computer spreadsheet to track ballots they were mailing out, but eventually gave up.

Way swore in a deposition that she and her direct supervisor, Garth Fell, an assistant elections superintendent, approved a Nov. 17 mail-ballot report falsely showing that all absentee ballots had been accounted for. She said they couldn’t get the numbers to add up otherwise.

In his deposition, Fell said elections superintendent Bill Huennekens knew about the inaccuracies in the report before the county canvassing board certified the election results.

But in testimony Tuesday, Huennekens denied knowing about inaccuracies in the report. He acknowledged, however, that he didn’t “have an exact number” of absentee ballots in the Democratic-leaning county that includes Seattle.

Under cross-examination from Democratic attorneys Wednesday, Way said she didn’t know for sure that the report was inaccurate until much later.

The judge then asked her: “Do you have any sense in your mind as you sit here this afternoon that that number is accurate or not?”

“I don’t know,” Way replied.

Also Wednesday, the court heard from a Republican data analyst -- over objections from the Democrats’ lawyers -- who showed a pattern among the King County precincts with the largest discrepancies between ballots counted and people credited with voting.

The five precincts with more votes than voters tended to favor Gregoire, and the six precincts with fewer votes than voters tended to favor Rossi, said the analyst, Clark Bensen. Democrats planned to cross-examine him today.