The Latest Returns

Behind the microphone, Dean Logan was just getting his road show, the 2004 Election Revue, under way. Sure, a lot had gone awry with last year's vote. But his King County Records, Elections, and Licensing Services Division had success, too, Logan was saying. From the back row at Shoreline Community Center, an audience member was in apparent disagreement: "Bullshit!" he boomed. Logan, the county elections director, paused while some in the audience clapped and others shushed the critic. "So we experienced a series of challenges," Logan continued, nodding to the back row, "like just now."

Few laughed. He was, after all, talking about a head-scratching election in which 95 likely valid votes will not be counted, because they were temporarily lost, and 99 invalid votes, illegally cast by convicted state felons, have been counted. That and a litany of other deficiencies in King County's democratic process are the continuation of three years of elections-department breakdowns under the watch of Democratic King County Executive Ron Sims, and it's far from over. Absentee ballots still seem to pop up around the elections office—someone opens a drawer and another precinct reports. Officials have already confirmed that the dead and dishonest cast potentially deciding votes in the 2004 gubernatorial race, which was awarded to Democrat Christine Gregoire by 129 votes out of 2.8 million after three ballot counts. Hundreds more votes could still turn out to have been cast by untracked federal felons. As task forces continue to form, the whole screwball mess sails toward a court hearing next week and tedious appeals thereafter. The absolutely last, almost positively final November 2004 vote cast is expected to be in by, say, November 2005?

With this fire drill as his backdrop, Logan, 37, a wonkish, bespectacled onetime Democrat in a nonpartisan office, strives to stay on message. A former state elections director who is paid $127,000 for the county job he assumed in September 2003, Logan insists he's being up front about his department's failures. "I share the frustration of the public," he says, acknowledging a "level of carelessness" by some employees in the ballot-counting exercise. At recent town hall meetings sponsored by the League of Women Voters, Logan has discussed his recently released 2004 Elections Report, giving scant notice to the 129-vote elephant in the room—the one that turned Republican gubernatorial candidate Dino Rossi into a full-time Realtor. At every stop, from the suburbs to Seattle over the past few weeks, Logan has spread the gospel that, yes, the elections office has sinned but so have the politicians and voters—that these were collective failures from which a bipartisan miracle will arise. During his short tenure as elections boss, Logan's troubled department has fixed a computer system that was "tied together by shoestrings," as he puts it, has grappled with a record-setting voter overload, and has hand counted 900,000-some ballots in 16 days with 300 people watching. A smattering of applause wouldn't be unwelcome.

Not gonna happen. Logan's critics, mostly Republican, see dead people, mostly Democrats, lining up at the polls. Behind them are a cabal of felons, the homeless, and the anonymous with a ballot in each hand. Detractors have at least 745 reasons why Logan and boss Sims allowed this to happen. That's the number of deceased people, criminals, double-voters, or noncitizens who, Republicans claim in a lawsuit against counties and the state, illegally cast King County ballots in 2004. The GOP isn't about to let Sims neatly tie it up with the blue- ribbon review panel he just appointed, especially after Logan's seemingly final word on the subject in a self-evaluation called the 2004 Elections Report. "What a joke," said one Shoreline audience member. "His people investigating his people!" Said another: "We need to see people in prison for this."

Dean Logan speaking in Shoreline (Rick Anderson)

Logan listened but didn't respond. Whether or not incarceration is the solution, that remark at the Shoreline meeting raises some interesting questions seemingly lost in the probes, litigation, and spin of the closest statewide election in Washington history: Can any one person be blamed for this mess? Who should clean it up? Who can clean it up? Who would want to clean it up? Logan had already tried, and look what happened.

Fifteen days after the Nov. 2 election, Logan certified it—as required by law, he says. "Not true!" shouted a Shoreline audience member. At least one earlier county election was not certified in a timely way because of irregularities. Besides, weren't votes still coming in? How can Logan claim he's correcting a system that's still breaking down? The other day, it was the discovery of 95 uncounted ballots in storage bins, which will not be counted unless a court rules otherwise, Logan tells me. The discovery also led to a concession that one ballot count, his office's final Mail Ballot Report, was flat wrong. That exposed another flaw in the tabulation process: Rather than tally absentee ballots when they arrive at the elections office, so the number can later be inventoried, the county based its bottom line on those eventually counted—in essence, the number of ballots it could find in the office.

Some county workers knew in November they had lost track of some ballots, but, Logan says, word of that reached his desk only recently. He transferred some workers, then put four on paid leave after another snafu: failing to insert absentee ballots in envelopes sent to some voters for an upcoming all-mail Valley General Hospital District levy election. The issue of staff incompetence is a touchy subject. Civil servants have nearly ironclad job protection and extensive rights of appeal to prevent their dismissal or even demotion, a subjective process to begin with. To some of his critics, Sims hasn't acted forcefully to weed out failures. In 2002, when things went wrong, he fired two elections-department heads but left the ailing body intact. Actually, he didn't can the elections superintendent, Julie Anne Kempf, until a few days after a Seattle Times editorial chided that Sims "must stop passing blame, move beyond apologies and restore the integrity of his elections office." A few months later in 2003, elections chief Bob Roegner followed Kempf out the door, and Sims promised a complete fix, claiming, "It will never, ever again happen."