When Your Vote Doesn’t Count

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A Seattle Time article reports that the King County Council Chairman, Larry Phillips, voted by absentee ballot and later found his name on a list of ballot rejections.

It seems that people are not notified when their votes are rejected. They are just silently thrown away, and nothing is done to correct the problem.

This councilman could check on his, though.

When he contacted the King County Elections Director, Dean Logan, he was told that his signature was not on file. This was an error.

The Washington State Republican Chairman Chris Vance says that if we have to check on these kinds of mistakes it will break our election process.

However, it seems to me that when people’s votes are not counted for whatever reason, the election process is already broken.

  • Anonymous

    Well, since the Councilman’s vote wasn’t counted, it looks like there will actually be a review of the rejected absentee ballots – totalling over 500 in King County. Voters will be notified if their ballots were rejected and offered an opportunity to fix them. What a grand idea… I hope they continue to do this for all elections in the future.

  • Anonymous

    561 votes according to this Seattle Times article. They were disqualified because the people’s signatures were not entered into a computer. However, the county had the signature cards on file. So they are, indeed, valid votes.

    Republican “voice” is saying that King County is just trying to find votes wherever it can to shift the election in favour of the Democrat’s candidate for Governor.

  • Anonymous

    Well, well! The Washington State Supreme Court actually said that the ballots the county screwed up on could be counted after all. As long as there was evidence that an error was made by the counters. Something make sense at last.

    Here’s the article.