Josh's Weblog: Golly! 93 More Ballots

Golly! 93 More Ballots

I waited a while to report on this in case of April Foolery, but it appears to be true. 93 more unopened absentee ballots have appeared in King County, Washington. Even OpinionJournal's John Fund agrees this looks bad for the Democrats fighting against invalidating the election. He wrote in today's “Political Diary:”

The lawsuit's contentions certainly received a boost with the discovery of the 93 extra ballots in the “archives” of King County Election Director Dean Logan. The response was immediate. Six council members, all Republicans, signed a letter asking U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez to investigate the election. Democrats called for an outside audit of Mr. Logan's office and expressed anger that they had only learned about the magical ballots in the press. Council Chairman Larry Phillips, a Democrat, told reporters it would be “premature” for him to call for Mr. Logan's resignation. Bob Ferguson, another Democratic council member, accused Mr. Logan of badly misjudging how to handle the bombshell news.

Regular readers of Sound Politics will note that Pierce County also found some uncounted ballots.

King County, however, always wins the prizes. The quote of most interest comes from an email from Donald Porter:

On my instructions, all untabulated ballots found during this investigation have been secured in the same manner as untabulated ballots are secured during the course of an election. I have instructed that no list of voters names associated with these ballots is to be released, nor, of course, are the ballots to be opened and counted absent a court order.

I had intended to release this information to you as soon as the investigation was completed so that we wouldn't have another situation of changing numbers. I expected that to be this afternoon. In any case, even if the investigation were not complete by this afternoon it was my intention to brief you all on this no later than Monday so that you would have the information before Tuesday's status hearing. Now, it appears that someone made a call to the media and REALS is responding to press inquiries on this, so I wanted you to have this much information immediately.

Will we ever get to know the names of the disenfranchised voters?

4/6/05 Update: I'm adding this post to the Beltway Traffic Jam.

Josh Poulson

Posted Tuesday, Apr 5 2005 11:56 AM