pudge's Journal: Voting Problems Addressed, Sort Of

Carolyn Diepenbrock, the Snohomish County elections manager, called me tonight.

First, she explained the 200 missing votes was not a tabulation error, but a reporting error. The report says 233 people showed up to vote in the Cliff precinct for the Fire District 18 election, but in fact, less than 100 people in the Cliff precinct are in Fire District 18, and so those other 200 voters were voting in a school district election, and not the Fire District 18 election. So this is simply a non-issue, unless the issue is better reporting software.

Second, she admitted her office should have notified us of the all-mail voting, and that it was their fault that the envelopes told us we could drop the ballots off in the local precinct polling place, when we could not. Of course, both problems could have been solved with the same action: a notice inside the ballot envelope explaining it all. She said they normally do this, but this time, did not.

Unfortunately, admitting the mistake and being sorry doesn't change the fact that we had an election decided by only 37 votes in a district of 3,957 voters, where 1,099 people voted, with countless voters who did not vote because of the county's misinformation.

The simple and deeply unfortunate fact is that we cannot reasonably trust the result of the Fire District 18 election -- and this has been tacitly admitted to me by the County Auditor's office -- and chances are nothing is going to be done about it.