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August 09, 2005
A rebel without a clue....
Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water...The Shark rears it's ugly version of political fairy tales:
I now have documentation from King County and the Secretary of State proving what has been suspected for months but which state and county officials have insistently denied all along -- King County did NOT mail all of the required military and overseas ballots by the Oct. 8th deadline. Dozens if not hundreds of King County military ballots that should have gone out on the 8th were sent out late. Over 5,000 non-military ballots covered by the UOCAVA guidelines (overseas citizens, possibly military dependents) were sent out at least 4 days late and hundreds of others appear to have been sent more than 4 days late.
No Stefan...you really don't. I've been looking over your "documentation" at length. What you have is akin to a big roll of toilet paper.
I contacted both the Secretary of State's office and King County Records and Elections yesterday to give them an opportunity to respond to my findings. The Secretary of State's office responded today with evidence indicating that King County misled them last October. King County did not dispute my findings.
I contacted both the Secretary of State's office and King County Elections today to give them an opportunity to respond to your findings. My results were much different and infinitely more factual than yours, it appears.
Additionally and for future reference...just because someone doesn't call you back to "dispute your findings" doesn't make your findings correct. Brad Pitt has never contacted me to dispute my finding that he wants to put me up in a new home on the beach in Malibu. But I harbor no delusion that my "finding" is correct, either.
More after the jump.
King County was supposed to send all of it's military and overseas ballots out by October 8, 2004. This date had been King County's own cutoff date that they were working toward. Down the road, the feds made October 8 their cutoff for all of the counties in Washington. The feds said they'd sue if Washington State didn't get all of it's ballots out by the 8th:
On Oct. 7, State Elections Director Nick Handy sent all county auditors an e-mail tagged "URGENT" telling them about a threat from the senior litigation attorney for the Department of Justice. Handy said the state's attorney had been told the federal government "is preparing a lawsuit to be filed tomorrow against the state of Washington."He said the conflict could be avoided with what he described as "one final offer" from the federal government. The next day he wrote the Justice Department agreeing to a compromise:
Four counties — Franklin, Pend Oreille, San Juan and Whatcom — would mail federal write-in ballots instead of regular absentee ballots so they could meet the federally imposed deadline.
Note the glaring absence of King from that list. But it gets more interesting:
All but one county met the federal deadline, Handy said. Island County fell a few days behind in mailing less than 1,000 ballots, an oversight he said was reported to the Justice Department.
Why isn't Stefan screaming his little pixels off for the Island County Elections Office collective heads? Why just King..who can confirm that they did? Enquiring minds want to know.
Washington State Elections Director Nick Handy confirmed with the Department of Justice on October 8 that according to his office, all ballots were mailed on time.(Later it was discovered Island County had not..again Stefan is strangely mum on that one)
Stefan continues:
I asked Nick Handy yesterday if he would let me know what information King County provided him as the basis for that representation. He forwarded me this email to go along with this spreadsheet (which I converted to PDF).
Okay kids..click on the email. Go on. I dare ya. Note that the date of the email is August 4, 2005. The person in question is being asked to remember information that took place in October of 2004. The person thinks maybe it was 10K+ ballots and it may or may not have been Bill Huennkins she spoke with. This is definitive? No wonder Rossi lost.
The punchline: somebody from King County Elections (perhaps Bill Huennekens) told the SoS office that KC sent out all of its 10,564 UOCAVA ballots that it knew about at the time on Oct. 8th. Problem is, other King County records contradict that claim. Indeed, those records indicate that more than half of the UOCAVA ballots were sent out on Oct. 12th or later.
I suppose I could tiptoe through all of Stefan's accounting and spreadsheets again. But I have the feeling that now, as it was then, it would be an exercise in futility. Stefan has jacked around with numbers before in an effort to make himself relevant. And with Rossi's court challenge loss his efforts at relevance are even more desperate.
And then there's the fact that the US military and the voting rights wing of the Department of Justice have received no complaints from Washington state residents regarding not getting their ballots.
It's over Stefan. You lost. Deal with it.
Posted by Carla at August 9, 2005 04:26 PM
