New election system hit glitches, records reveal
Problems part of a 'learning curve,' not pivotal to governor's race, official says

By MICHELLE NICOLOSI AND PHUONG CAT LE
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER    22 January 2005

Many of King County's problems with missing and delayed ballots, rejected votes and duplicate ballots sent to voters this fall can be traced to one culprit: human error.

The county installed a new voter-tracking system in 2004, and put the system to the test for the first time in the primary and general elections.

Thousands of pages of documents released recently by the county show that in October as residents were lining up in record numbers to register election workers were sending a flurry of e-mails to their tech-support team asking how to use their new system.

"The bar code on the labels is not scanning in at least 95 percent of the ballots," the mail ballot operations supervisor wrote to the tech team on Oct. 18. "I must be doing something very wrong," she wrote again in Oct. 23 while trying to issue ballots. "What have I done wrong?"

E-mails among county election workers show that tensions mounted as election workers peppered the tech-support team with questions.

One tech-support person wrote on Oct. 28 that some of the election workers "have NO IDEA how to solve the smallest of problems" with the system, called Data Information Management Systems or DIMS. "Do they really know what they are doing???" ... What kind of help do they need???? Brain Transplant???"

The DIMS project manager e-mailed Dean Logan, King County elections director, on Nov. 5, three days after the election, to say that the tech-support team has "dealt with ... a myriad of problems created by data processing errors. ... There has been a lot of disconnect and poor communication."

None of the problems caused by the expected "learning curve" was major, and none of them affected the outcome of the election, said Bill Huennekens, county elections superintendent.

But Washington Republicans who are suing to have the results of the governor's race thrown out say these and other previously reported errors could easily have affected the outcome of the election.

  
 
Democrat Christine Gregoire defeated Republican Dino Rossi by 129 votes in a hand recount of almost 2.9 million ballots statewide. Rossi had won the initial count and a subsequent machine recount.

In a lawsuit, Republicans are trying to prove that mistakes made in the election process invalidate the result.

"Of course they're going to say that" these errors didn't affect the outcome of the election, said Chris Vance, chairman of the Washington State Republican Party. "If it were revealed tomorrow that everybody in King County who voted for Rossi actually intended to vote for Gregoire and vice versa, King County would still issue a statement that everything went fine and it had no effect on the outcome of the election."

Records and interviews show that a series of errors made by people not yet familiar with the DIMS system were behind many of King County's problems in the election, including:

Workers accidentally sent thousands of duplicate ballots to voters who d their voter registration with a new phone number or some other detail. Election workers neglected to check a box to let the system know that they were updating a file, not issuing a new ballot, officials said.

New ballots should be sent only when the address or ballot type is changed, or when people request a replacement ballot, officials said.

"Some of these voters were mistakenly issued another ballot," computer support person Scott Turnbull wrote in an October e-mail to Logan and Huennekens. "I think we can classify these as user error."

The county put a team of seven to 10 people to work calling about 3,500 voters who were accidentally sent two, three and sometimes four ballots to ask them to throw the extra ballots away.

County officials said the county's election system does not allow more than one vote per person to be counted.

The controversial 735 King County ballots that were not included in the first vote count but were included in the recount after the Washington State Supreme Court ruled that King County could include them were ballots cast by voters who had "no signature on file."

In some of those cases, the county didn't have the voters' signatures on file because their registration forms were incorrectly scanned and the signatures didn't show up in the new system, officials said.

"In a database that has a million records there are probably at all points in time going to have some records that don't have an (signature) image attached," Huennekens said.

Workers were supposed to put those "NSOF" ballots aside and find the hard copy of the registration form and compare the signature, but that was not done. The elections office is investigating.

A number of ballots rejected because the ballot signature didn't match the registration signature were compared to the wrong voter's signature, because workers had scanned the wrong signatures into voters' records.

In some records, "somehow through some kind of data entry error, the image (of the signature) has been misassociated," said Huennekens.

"We did up to 70,000 registrations in the four to six weeks before the election, and part of doing mass data entry is errors happen," he said.

Huennekens said that when the wrong signature is on file for a voter, that person's ballot should be set aside and workers should locate the correct signature and check against that.

The double-check system means that it's "not likely" a ballot from someone with the wrong signature on file would be rejected, Huennekens said.

Staff e-mails show that in at least one case, the ballot for a voter with the wrong signature on file was double-checked and "it appears the person that rechecked him put his ballot back in the problem pile instead of the rebatch file." His vote was ultimately counted.

At least seven King County voters never received their vote-by-mail ballots for the general election because their data was somehow ped from the new voter-tracking system.

As with many of these other problems, "that was human error," said Huennekens.

The mailing of more than 900 absentee ballots was delayed in October, likely because of another user error, records show.

"The best I can determine is that someone had removed the 'mail a ballot?' flag," a worker with the DIMS vendor wrote in an e-mail. "The county is getting quite a number of calls from voters asking where their ballot is." Those ballots were sent out on Oct. 26.

About 12,300 ballots were printed with bar codes that the system could not scan.

The data from those ballots had to be entered by hand, adding to the already tremendous workload of King County election workers at the time.