No-party voters lost their ballot secrecy

KENNETH P. VOGEL; The Tacoma News Tribune 16 September 2004

A voter's party choice in Tuesday's primary election was supposed to remain secret. But that wasn't the case for Pierce and King county voters whose party choice was no party.

Voters who tried to cast nonpartisan ballots at the polls were met with error messages from machines, which returned their ballots. Pierce County's machines also electronically chirped at voters who didn't pick a party. That prompted a visit from poll workers alerting voters - and in some cases anyone else within earshot - that they hadn't picked a party.

The intent, according to Pierce County Auditor Pat McCarthy and King County Elections Director Dean Logan, was to give voters a second chance to pick a party, since without such a selection votes for candidates for partisan offices wouldn't have been counted.

But critics of the new primary said it embarrassed or offended some voters who chose not to select a party by forcing them to reveal that decision, even if only to a poll worker.

Voters skipping the party preference question could still vote in nonpartisan races, including for Superior Court and Supreme Court judges, the state superintendent of public instruction and ballot propositions. But in Pierce and King counties, they had to confirm their intent to poll workers, who were instructed to override the error messages, allowing the machines to accept the nonpartisan votes.

Both counties reported some problems in that process.

McCarthy said some of the override buttons on Pierce County machines weren't working, while Logan said some King County poll workers couldn't figure out how to use them. In both cases, effected ballots were set aside to be counted later at the counties' elections centers.

The new primary was the state's solution to a federal court ruling declaring Washington's 70-year-old blanket primary unconstitutional. The old primary allowed voters to pick candidates from different parties.

Almost 12 percent of the 111,000 Pierce County voters whose ballots were counted as of Tuesday afternoon did not select a party. Statewide 8.6 percent of voters didn't pick a party. In King County it was 6.1 percent and in Thurston County 4.9 percent.

It's taking longer than usual to tally votes because of difficulties with ballots from voters who did not pick a party, McCarthy and Logan said. Both said they instructed poll workers to be sensitive in handling these voters. Both said many voters were happy for the reminder.

But McCarthy said one poll worker told her a nonpartisan voter was upset that he felt that his privacy was violated because the poll worker asked him whether he intended to select a party.

"If one poll worker tells me that, then there are others out there who had the same experience," she added.

Logan, whose agency received complaints from 10 to 12 nonpartisan voters, said the goal in checking with them was to "help prevent a voter from inadvertently disenfranchising themselves. And that seemed like a higher need than having a voter acknowledge that they didn't want to select a political party."

But Tuesday's election reinforced dissatisfaction with the new primary, said Toni McKinley, legislative director for the Washington State Grange. Her group is sponsoring an initiative to replace the new system with one more closely resembling the old blanket primary.

Initiative 872, which will appear on November ballots, asks voters whether they want to institute a primary election system that would advance the top two vote-getters to the general election regardless of their party affiliations.

McKinley predicted that anger over having to announce a nonpartisan ballot choice in the new primary "is going to have a huge effect on I-872."

She added, "Washington voters are just so darned independent. That's just the way they are."