Have you or anybody you know been disenfranchised by the WA State Republican Party? Download the list of all 1944 voters who have had their registration challenged, and look for yourself.
It took less than 24 hours of voter backlash before the GOP was forced to belatedly withdraw 140 of their challenges (PDF)… after these voters had already received notice that their votes would not count unless they attended an administrative hearing. That kind of sloppiness is already inexcusable when it comes to a citizen’s right to vote, but I betcha on closer examination we’ll find a helluva lot more “mistakes.”
As the GOP’s incredible fuckup has just illustrated, the process of cleaning the voter rolls has never been as simple as the Republicans have tried to make it out to be in their cynical and patently dishonest efforts disparage King County Records & Elections. And like all counties, King has never been nearly as hands off as the GOP’s lying press releases would lead you to believe. Indeed cleaning the ever changing voter rolls is a constant and time consuming process, especially in a county with over 1.1 million registrations, where thousands of voters are moving, marrying and dying every day.
According to a fact sheet produced by KCRE, the county routinely runs queries to screen out post office boxes, duplicate registrations and deceased voters. Since the last election:
- Over 9,500 duplicate registrations have been merged.
- Over 8,900 deceased have been removed from the voter rolls.
- Over 73,000 registrations have been put on inactive status.
And that doesn’t even begin to count the thousands of new and canceled registrations and address changes that are processed every month. Some of these transactions are initiated by voters, others through the routine operations at KCRE. For example, take this anecdote I recounted back in August:
As a case in point, a friend of mine recently bought a house in West Seattle. I was over there for dinner the other night, and she told me how that very day, she had called King County Elections to change her address… and was surprised to learn that she was already registered at her new house! When she inquired how, she was told that they had mailed her a voter registration card, but that it was returned to KC Elections with a forwarding address; so they updated her records and mailed her a new card. Indeed, the new card was in her mailbox that very same day.
Talk about service. Call to change your registration, immediately look in your mailbox, and there’s your new voter registration card.
Now that’s the type of positive headline you’re never going to read