Carlson in particular is his propensity TO manufacture stories. As Grandpa has correctly pointed out, there is no lack of legitimate reasons to contest this election and to have a revote. Why Carlson feels the need to invent stuff may be the answer as to why he received less than 40% of the vote in 2000!

The election worker's e-mail follows:

I work at elections and I spent most of the night tossing and turning without being able to sleep. I just felt like I needed to send you a message on an anonymous computer before I go into work today. I can't contact you directly, because I can't afford to lose my job, and I am hoping that you can just have your lawyers look into these things because if you expose where you got this information from it will point a finger right at a few of us here in the office who are just disgusted with what is going on. But if there was ever an investigation, we would all be happy to tell the truth.
Before I start, I just want to say that I don't consider myself to be a Republican. Actually, I work in elections, so I don't really consider myself a Democrat, either, but I probably vote for more Democrats than Republicans.

But I am just sick to my stomache about what they are doing to you people (the Republicans) here in King County. I voted for Gregoire, I'll admit it, but it sure seems to me that it's much more important for the votes to be counted correctly and for everyone to know the election was fair, than for one side to be able to screw around with the numbers to make their candidate win in a close race. Like the Democrats are doing here.

I have been reading all of the articles in the papers because honestly we get more correct information about what we are working on from the newspapers then we do from our own management. We're all spread out in three different places, and even in the administration building, we are on two different floors so we don't have the opportunity to talk with each other as much as normal, plus management tries to keep us from having certain information because they are always afraid of leaks. But we do talk enough to know when things are just not right and there's times when what's right for the voters has to be more important than anything else.

I have worked here for years, and we used to be all about the voters, and making every vote count every day and in everything we did. That was the attitude from top to bottom. That's not the way it is anymore and it hasn't been for a couple of years. I'm tired of management being able to lie to the press and getting a free ride. And don't believe the crap about Ron Sims not being involved. There are people from his office coming over here all the time. They have it set up like the Mafia - the Don can never be touched because all the communication goes through the trusted lieutenants. But don't you believe for a second that Ron isn't calling the shots, and isn't ALWAYS calling the shots.

Here are some things from the inside view that seem like they should be important to this election.

1. I think you should ask Bill or Dean point blank if there were any problems with the military ballots and see what they tell you. Maybe they will tell you the truth, maybe they won't. Word finally got around to us regular workers that the only military ballots sent out were the overseas ones on October 8 or 9 (which was late already), and that any we put in the computer or that were what we call domestic (US mail address) didn't go out because of a "glitch" in the computer. I get tired of everything being blamed on a glitch. This is just plain a screw-up by the absentee people. They had the data to mail these ballots out and they just didn't do it.

We kept getting complaints from military people by phone and email before the election and some after, and so anyvoter who realized early enough that their ballot was not coming and had the opportunity to pick up the phone (some military people are on assignments that keep them from being able to call the outside world, even when they are stationed here in the US) and called was sent a ballot, but anyone who did not, or could not call in time did not get one. If you want do public disclosure requests for any emails about this (like copies of the complaints to the office), do it quick.

We have rules being enforced about erasing email fast to make sure that it doesn't get backed up and nobody from the outside can request email and the county can't get in trouble for not providing it. I think this is because of the lawsuit from that guy that got the county fined, but they claim it is for better "information management". I think this is illegal, it seems like complaints that come into the election office belong to the people and better information management doesn't consist of erasing documents and voter complaints, but who am I to say? I just work here.

2. Like I said in the one above, if you want any documents for a recount or for any lawsuits, better ask King County for them now, because we have been told to delete things to keep them from getting out to the public. You might want to ask the county to freeze anything they have. At least make them tell all of us staff not to delete our e-mail or "old" documents.

3. I think someone needs to do the math and find out where the extra mystery 10K ballots really came from, because we sure don't know and we work here. We can figure out about 3,000 more than we thought, mostly provisional ballots sent from other counties and some late arriving overseas ballots with good postmarks. The absentee supervisors have gotten all weird and secretive when people ask. And no, they weren't just sitting around here. The extra "good" ballots appeared over the weekend. I don't know what absentee "supervisor" told you people that we don't have a way of counting the incoming absentee ballots, that's just bulls**t if you pardon my French. We DO have a way of knowing how many absentees have come back.

The ballots are sorted and counted as they come in every day and we know how many have come in. We post it on the internet for crying out loud. There hasn't been any large amount of ballots come back for a whole week.

The mail drops down to just a trickle by the Monday after the election. Even if you take all of the ballots we got in the mail on last Saturday and this past Monday (hardly any, including military ballots) and add them to provisional ballots we got from out of the county on Saturday and Monday, it just doesn't add up. And there are ways to slip in extra ballots and make them look legitimate if the race is close. Ask for an exact accounting.

They will not be able to give you one right away. They will have to play with the numbers to make it look legitimate.

4. The Democrats asked to see just the provisional ballots that had no signature. If they were aware of what is really going on, they should have also looked at the provisional ballots that are being set aside and not counted because the voter is "not registered". We were so far behind with putting registrations in the computer that at one point the supervisors just made a set of boxes with thousands of registrations "disappear" overnight.

(And no, they were not entered. We had a night crew, but not a night crew so big or experienced that they could input thousands of registrations overnight.) We were weeks behind with no way to catch up and they were telling everyone and the papers that we were caught up. It was just a nightmare. We never would have gotten to these people anyway before the election even if the box had not disappeared. I bet that these cards will magically reappear after the election as registrations that were "too late" for this election. But they weren't. I saw when they came in. They were in on time, and now those people didn't get to vote or voted a provisional ballot that won't be counted.

Please look in to these things. Every vote should count, and people should be able to expect that the elections are not going to be a screwed up mess every time. And there's tons of screw ups in this office that get covered up each election. It didn't used to be this way.

Aren't there Republicans on the Council that can call for an investigation? AN OUTSIDE investigation, not a set-up to help hide the dirt and prop up Ron Sims? And not a Secretary of State investigation when they will just cover their friends' butts again. I know Reed is a Republican, but those people at the Secretary of State's office and the management they sent here are all friends, and will cover for each other above all else.

(And yes, I have voted for Ron Sims before, but never again. I'm tired of working for a county that is corrupt, and this person who votes for Democrats would gladly vote for a Republican if they will clean up the county. Hopefully you guys can run someone competitive next year, who's moderate enough that us disgruntled Democrats can vote for them, too.)

Joe O'Donnell, who broke the story of the hundreds of unverified provisional ballots that were fed into election machines, sends us this email on the King County's military absentee ballots that supposedly went out on Oct. 7:

From Bulk Permit #1455 (the permit that is used for mailing absentee ballots)

What I have found is that there was activity only on that account on October 2nd (1,605 pieces) and October 13th. (28,000 pieces) There was no activity in between those to dates.

I asked if the submission and billing occurs on the same day. And the computer showed that yes the bulk mailing was received by USPS on the 13th and billed on the 13th.

When I asked for a hard copy she clammed up saying, because it was of a political nature she would have to forward me on to her supervisor. She must have looked the name of organization on the account.

The supervisor was out at another post office branch, so I left a voice mail with him to set up a meeting this afternoon. At that time I will give him my expedited review FOIA and try to obtain hard copies of the information today.

Before I left I repeated myself "no activity from the between the 2nd and 13th?"
She said "No activity"

I will confirm with the supervisor that there are no other bulk permits used for absentee ballots.
...

This looks like another "mistake"

JOHN FUND ON THE TRAIL

Don't Count Rossi Out
A stolen election in Washington state? Not if bloggers can help it.

Monday, January 10, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST

The new media--talk radio, bloggers and independent watchdog groups--have followed up their success in exposing Dan Rather's use of phony memos by showcasing another scandal: Washington state's bizarre race for governor, which features a vote count so close and compromised it allows Florida to retire the crown for electoral incompetence. If Democrat Christine Gregoire, who leads by 129 votes and is scheduled to take the office Wednesday, eventually has to face a new election, it will have been in large part because of the new media's ability to give the story altitude before it reached the courts.

When the idea of a revote was first broached three weeks ago by a moderate Republican former secretary of state, Ms. Gregoire's reaction was swift: "Absolutely ludicrous." With Republican candidate Dino Rossi filing a formal court challenge last Friday alleging a massive breakdown in the vote count, she may still think the idea of a court-ordered revote is laughable, but her legal team is taking it seriously. "There's not even a 50-50 chance a court would rule with Republicans to set aside the election," says Jenny Durkan, a Gregoire confidant who is representing state Democrats. Hardly an expression of supreme confidence.

The feeling that a revote is possible is buoyed by polls showing the public still thinks Mr. Rossi, who won the first two vote counts before falling behind in the third, actually won. His legal team has also compiled a strong body of evidence showing irregularities, certainly one far more detailed than that which North Carolina officials used last week to order a statewide March revote of the race for agriculture commissioner after a computer ate 4,438 ballots in a GOP-leaning county. Without those votes, the GOP candidate was leading by 2,287 votes out of 3.5 million cast.


In Washington state, the errors by election officials have been compared to the antics of Inspector Clouseau, only clumsier. At least 1,200 more votes were counted in Seattle's King County than the number of individual voters who can be accounted for. Other counties saw similar, albeit smaller, excess vote totals. More than 300 military personnel who were sent their absentee ballots too late to return them have signed affidavits saying they intended to vote for Mr. Rossi. Some 1 out of 20 ballots in King County that officials felt were marked unclearly were "enhanced" with Wite-Out or pens so that some had their original markings obliterated.
Most disturbing is the revelation last week by King County officials that at least 348 unverified provisional ballots were fed directly into vote-counting machines. "Did it happen? Yes. Unfortunately, that's part of the process in King County," elections superintendent Bill Huennekens told the Seattle Times. "It's a very human process, and in some cases that did happen."

King County elections director Dean Logan, Mr. Huennekens' boss, also concedes the discrepancy between the number of ballots cast and the list of people who are recorded as voting. Even though the gap is 1,200 votes, he says, "that does not clearly indicate that the election would have turned out differently." Are voters supposed to trust an election merely because it can't "clearly" be shown to be hopelessly tainted? Mr. Logan is certainly singing a different tune now than he was on Nov. 18, when he responded to charges of voting irregularities in an e-mail to colleagues, which read in part: "Unfortunately, I have come to expect this kind of unsubstantiated crap. It's all too convenient, if not now fashionable, to stoop to this level when there is a close race."

Slade Gorton, a Republican former state attorney general and U.S. senator who is advising Mr. Rossi, says a court should order a revote rather than declare valid one of the two earlier vote counts that Mr. Rossi won. "No one can govern effectively under the cloud this race has created," Mr. Gorton says. He notes that state law doesn't require any showing of fraud to contest an election. "That is irrelevant to whether the election should be done over," he says. "The law is quite clear in giving a court the right to void any election where the number of illegal or mistaken votes exceeds the margin of victory, and it has done so in the past."

Mr. Gorton notes that Sam Reed, the Republican secretary of state who certified Ms. Gregoire's victory, issued a report in 2003 noting that King County's sloppy election procedures could lead to just this sort of election meltdown. "The county is not consistent in their ballot enhancement procedures," Mr. Reed's report concluded. "Ballot enhancement, while done in full view of political observers, did not use the procedures outlined in the Washington Administrative Code. Inconsistencies in how this procedure is handled significantly increase the possibility of a successful election contest."


Much of the evidence uncovered on King County's flouting of election laws first appeared on Soundpolitics.com, a blog run by computer consultant Stefan Sharkansky. A former liberal who worked for Michael Dukakis in 1988, Mr. Sharkansky calls himself a "9/11 conservative mugged by reality." He uses his knowledge of statistics and probability to illustrate how unlikely some of the reported vote count changes are. He also uncovered the fact that in Precinct 1823 in downtown Seattle, 527, or 70%, of the 763 registered voters used 500 Fourth Avenue--the King County administration building--as their residential address. A full 61% of the precinct's voters only registered in the last year, and nearly all of them "live" at 500 Fourth Avenue. By contrast, only 13% of all of King County voters registered in 2004.
Not all of the voters at the county building are homeless or hard to find. A noted local judge and her husband have been registered at the county building for years. When I called her to ask why, she became flustered and said it was because of security concerns, specifically because "the Mexican mafia are out to get me." When I pointed out that her home address and phone number were easily found on the Internet and in property records, she ended the conversation by refusing to answer a question about whether she had improperly voted for state legislative candidates who would represent the county building but not her residence.

Even liberal officeholders in Seattle privately acknowledge that the combination of bloggers, talk radio and local think tanks like the Evergreen Freedom Foundation have helped skeptics of the election's validity win the public relations war. Evergreen president Bob Williams says his group isn't focused on overturning Ms. Gregoire's election so much as on highlighting the obvious problems in the vote count that cry out for permanent legislative fixes. He notes the public is paying attention: A poll taken last week by Seattle's KING-TV found that by a 20-point margin state residents back a new election, and by 53% to 36% they don't think Mr. Rossi should concede.

Seattle Times columnist Joni Balter says the attack on the vote count by Republican-leaning media "is by now a near-military operation--air, land and sea." She blames radio hosts Kirby Wilbur, John Carlson and Mike Siegel for keeping listeners updated and in a constant state of outrage. "There's a lot to be outraged about," responds Mr. Carlson, an unsuccessful candidate for governor in 2000. "Last week, I did 13 out of my show's 15 hours on the election and people wanted more."

In his new book, "Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation," radio host and law professor Hugh Hewitt calls the new media a form of "open-source journalism" in which gatekeepers can no longer control what reaches the public. Readers and listeners interact with bloggers and talk show hosts so that a free market of ideas and information can emerge. "Blogs analyzed the Washington state election shenanigans in a more sophisticated and comprehensive way than the mainstream media," he told me. "When a swarm of blogs and new media focus on a story it can fundamentally alter the general public's understanding of an event or person. Ask John Kerry, Trent Lott, Tom Daschle and soon-to-retire CBS anchor Dan Rather if they think the new media changed people's perceptions of them."


Similarly, when Christine Gregoire takes the oath of office as governor on Wednesday, she will still face a threat to her seat of power should the new media keep up the pressure and more evidence of a tainted vote count emerges in court.
She would do well to recall what happened in Minnesota after the 1962 election for governor there. Republican Elmer Anderson won a squeaker and was sworn in, but a recount of disputed ballots ground on. A hundred days into Mr. Anderson's term, a panel of three state judges ruled that Democrat Karl Rolvaag had actually won by 91 votes. To end the legal wrangling, Mr. Anderson dropped any appeals and calmly left office, allowing Mr. Rolvaag to move into the governor's mansion.

You can expect the new media to talk up that historical example a lot as they seek to instill in the public's mind the belief that Washington state's election for governor isn't over just because after Wednesday someone occupies the office.

Originally posted by grandpa:
Here's some more BS on a national scale:

Quote:

JOHN FUND ON THE TRAIL

Don't Count Rossi Out
A stolen election in Washington state? Not if bloggers can help it.

Originally posted by eddie:
I'm still waiting for KVI to tell me just exactly how many Military ballots we are talking about. ... Today, Carlson trumpeted a soundpolitics.com article about an in-depth investigation of the mailing of overseas ballots by King Co. When I pointed out to him that King Co. may have more than one bulk postage account, he said that he "assumed that they wouldn't". I do not know the answer on today's revelation, ...