[E-voting] Breaking news of lawsuit in Washington state elections

[Marian Beddill]

At 1/30/2005  11:53 AM, Catherine wrote:
>http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/1326/2754.html?1107105987#POST3882
>
>Breaking news about a lawsuit in Snohomish County, Washington State, where 
>there were many kinds of voting irregularities uncovered, and where the 
>touch-screen results were at variance from the other ballots.

Yup, Snohomish County's right down the road about 100km from me, and I have 
been on top of it.  There are two major oddities in this state-wide election.

One of the oddities is that the computer-voting numbers were notably at 
odds with the paper-ballot numbers in that county.  Snohomish  county has 
three ways of voting: by touch-screen at the polling-stations on Election 
Day Tuesday, by postal ballot (still called "absentee"), and by 
"provisional" ballot - for a person who claims to be a qualified voter but 
shows up at a polling-station which does not have that name in the 
voters-registry file/book. Their ballot is provisionally accepted, but kept 
separate from the voters who were in the book, thus were not questioned.

The challenge happened in the race for Washington State Governor, which had 
an election on November 2nd 2004, and then went through two statewide 
recounts.  (Gregoire vs Rossi)

The two lead candidates differed STATEWIDE first by only 261 votes(*), 
triggering a legally required recount, which was by machine, and it changed 
the difference to only 42 votes(**).  Then Gregoire's party exercised their 
ordinary right to ask for a manual recount, and posted funds to pay for it 
(about $US750,000).  That was done, and the result of the manual recount 
reversed the outcome, ending with an opposite difference of 129 
votes(***).  The "new" ("real") winner, Gregoire, has been sworn into 
office, and the loser, Rossi, has filed suit.

So now there are now TWO lawsuits over this election.

The basis of the FIRST suit (by the now-loser, Rossi's folks) seems to be 
claimed improper handling of ballots, especially provisional ones.  But the 
other gross and unexplained disparity is the difference between the 
sub-totals of the machine votes and the paper ballots.  The machine votes 
strongly favored one candidate, Rossi; paper ballots the other, 
Gregoire.  Odd, to say the least.

The NEW lawsuit focuses on the private, secret status of the machine 
software, claiming the loss of public process required for all government 
actions, due to the proprietary hold on the software code in the DRE 
machines and systems.
(Background:  http://www.votersunite.org/takeaction/mediaSnohomishCounty.htm  )

(*)   261 in 2,805,913 counted, a percentage of   0.009302%
http://vote.wa.gov/general/statewide_results.aspx?o=7FR30bVZqpnn5rCqJv1pVg%3d%3d 


(**)   42 in 2,808,341 counted, a percentage of   0.001496%
http://vote.wa.gov/general/recount.htm

(***)  129 in 2,810,058 counted, a percentage of   0.004591%
http://vote.wa.gov/general/recount.aspx

Marian Beddill
Whatcom County, WA


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