Military ballots sent out on time, county logs show

King County election officials yesterday released a log of absentee-ballot mailings to buttress their previous statements that ballots went to armed-forces members by the federal deadline of Oct. 8.

Acting under the threat of a federal lawsuit, election officials scrambled to get thousands of absentee ballots out to soldiers, sailors and aviators stationed abroad for the Nov. 2 election.

The log of outgoing mail shows that 1,853 ballots destined for armed-forces members were delivered to the International Station post office in Seattle on Oct. 7.

That was the same day state Elections Director Nick Handy warned county election officials around the state that the U.S. Department of Justice had threatened to sue the state unless every county mailed overseas military ballots by the next day.

After delivering the first batch of military ballots to the post office, King County election workers took the remaining ballots to a mailing contractor in Kent later that day and on the morning of Oct. 8.

King County Elections Superintendent Bill Huennekens said the last of 3,055 overseas military ballots went into the postal system Oct. 8 — meeting the federal deadline.

An additional 5,478 ballots were mailed to armed-forces members within the United States on Oct. 12. More than 570,000 absentee ballots went to other voters the next day, according to the log.

The date of the military mailings became controversial this week, as commentators on Web logs and talk radio suggested that King County officials lied when they said ballots had been mailed Oct. 7.

Those accusations were based on reports that King County Elections' bulk-mailing permit wasn't used between Oct. 2 and 13. But election officials said the permit isn't used to send ballots to armed-forces members overseas because federal law allows the mail to be sent postage-free in both directions under a federal permit.

Accusations about the mailing of military ballots come on the heels of embarrassing revelations about the county's mishandling of about 732 returned absentee ballots, the improper counting of 348 provisional ballots at polling places and a 1,800-vote discrepancy between the numbers of ballots and voters.

"One thing that's personally frustrating for me is that we were busting ourselves to get these overseas ballots out on time," Huennekens said. "This is something I think we should be commended for."

Other counties also were hard-pressed to meet the federal deadline. Pierce County Auditor Pat McCarthy e-mailed colleagues around the state Oct. 7 saying she would get overseas military ballots mailed out "one way or another" by the next day.

Huennekens said it was difficult to prepare ballots and meet the mailing deadline because the general election comes so soon after the September primary.

State Secretary of State Sam Reed has proposed that the primary be moved from mid-September to June.

King County and its election-equipment vendor, Diebold Election Systems, had another problem with absentee ballots one week before the election. An Oct. 26 e-mail from Diebold staffer Kathy Pal to Diebold manager Russ Underwood said "we just discovered" 900 voters hadn't received "resend" or "second-issue" ballots.

"Resend" ballots are sent to absentee voters who either didn't receive their first ballot or whose ballot was lost or damaged. The e-mail was among documents released last week to the Republican and Democratic parties and The Seattle Times.

Huennekens said yesterday those ballots were resent on the day of Pal's memo.

Keith Ervin: 206-464-2105 or kervin@seattletimes.com

Information in this article, originally published January 13, 2005, was corrected January 27, 2005. A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that absentee ballots sent by King County to overseas voters on Oct. 7 and 8 were handled by PSI Group, a mailing contractor in Snohomish County. The company is located in Kent.