From my SO:
Greg Kimsey Town Hall

Greg Kimsey, Clark Count Auditor and Republican said he tries to hold two or three town meetings every year. He had the first one since the November election on Tuesday evening, January 12. Greg was elected in 2002 and his term runs until 2006. There were approximately 50 people at the meeting and by this observers estimation approximately two-thirds of them were Republican.

Most of the Democrats attending seemed content to let Greg make his presentation and then listen to the questions asked and the answers were provided. The people asking questions were active, vocal, occasionally confrontative and mostly Republican. The main subject of their questions was the recent gubernatorial election in Washington State. For whatever reason, the Republicans did not seem to be aware of much of the information that has been printed over the weeks following the election. Their questions revolved around three issues:

Why were there more votes than voters?
Why were all those ballots that the Democrats discovered allowed to be counted while those presented after-the-fact by the Republicans were rejected?
Why do we not require all those foreign-looking people to show proof of citizenship in order to let them vote?

I was very impressed by Greg's clear and straightforward answers to all those questions. The answers to the first two questions have been pretty well covered in the news reports, but briefly, the elections division is not all that concerned with crediting votes to specific voters during the counting process. They are more focused on verifying votes and counting them. After all the votes are counted, the election workers then go about the process of 'crediting' voters with having voted. They do this for several reasons, but the main one is that if you do not vote in two federal elections and an additional election your name is dropped from the active voter roles. It is typical in every election to not be able to 'credit' every voter to come up with an exact match between voters and ballots. The total mismatch difference in Clark County is currently at around 200, about the same as it was in the 2000 election. In the weeks after the election was certified in 2000 the election workers were able to get the number down to about 86. That is not bad when you start with over 175,000 votes. Greg said he expected the final tally for the 2004 election to be similar.

On the second question he explained that the 723 ballots that were originally rejected because of a mistake by the King County elections board were allowed to be included in the recount because they had not been fully considered. The law states that fully canvassed ballots cannot be re-assessed during a recount, but that ballots mistakenly excluded from the original count could be included. He further explained that other ballots were rejected because they had already been reviewed and rejected for valid reasons and those reasons had not changed and therefore they would still be excluded.

Greg could not really address the situation in King County, except to say that there had been some mistakes by the elections board and he would do everything he could to make sure that those types of mistakes never happened in Clark County. He did say very plainly that the election, initial ballot counting and all three re-counts carried out in Clark County were fair, accurate and according to plan. He also said that the third recount, the manual recount was the most accurate, in his opinion. He did mention one other factor that points out a striking difference between King County and their processes and our own Clark County. In King County, the average precinct size is around 400 voters. In Clark County the average precinct numbers around 1100 voters.

The answer to the third question was the most interesting. The elections division regularly receives complaints and reports of individuals voting who might not be residents of this country or for some other reason not eligible to vote. They investigate every one of these complaints and to date, not one of them has turned out to be valid. Every person who was alleged to be an illegal voter was in fact a legal citizen and just as entitled to vote as the person filing the complaint.

Another point that he took pains to make was the issue of a paper trail and electronic voting machines. He spent quite a bit of time explaining that having a paper trail was no guarantee that the machine was accurately tallying votes. His example was pretty simple. If a voter selects Candidate A and the machine gives the voter a receipt saying that the vote was cast for Candidate A, that really is not any guarantee that the machine did not actually tally a vote for Candidate B. He firmly believes that when Washington state and Clark County go to electronic voting machines, they will provide a paper trail; he just as firmly believes that the paper trail alone is not enough to verify that the machines are accurately counting the votes. It was an interesting note and one he made several times during the evening.

He talked a bit about the Help America to Vote Act (HAVA) which will take effect January 1, 2006. At that time all voting in Clark County will take place with optical scan ballots. The optical scan machines cost about five times as much and count votes about five times slower than the current punch card machines. There will also be one electronic voting machine in each polling place for the use of voters with physical limitations.

He addressed the issue of military voting. He explained the various processes the elections office had in place so that military personnel would receive their ballots in time to vote. He explained that even though the workers sometimes went to extraordinary lengths to assist the military members, it was hard to assure that a soldier in the hills of Afghanistan was going to get his or her ballot in a timely manner when you were sitting at a desk back here in Clark County. Some of the responsibility was on the military postal service and far out of the control of the Clark County elections officials.

Other items discussed were the Rossi lawsuit regarding the governor's race. Greg did make the point that the suit did not allege any voter or elections fraud, the typical reason that an election might be overturned. On a lighter note he did note that there is all elections officials went to bed the night before an election saying the same prayer. They prayed not that their candidates would win, but that whoever won would do so by a landslide.

He also talked about Secretary of State Sam Reed's recommendations for changes to the elections rules and said that he supported all of them with the exception of changing the deadline for mail-in ballots. Currently mail-in ballots only need to be postmarked by Election Day. Under the recommended change the ballot would need to be received by the elections officials by Election Day.

One of the most talked-about issues of the evening was the proposal of a requirement that voters be required to present some type of identification when they voted at a polling place. This issue was most often brought up by the Republicans in attendance who seemed to be fairly certain that some type of election fraud had taken place in the governor's race due to illegal voting. Greg stated on more than one occasion that those types of processes and checks could be implemented; however there would be a cost involved. It was noteworthy that our Republican friends could be so vociferous in their demands for additional services, but ignorant of how those extra services might be funded.

Overall, Mr. Kimsey did a commendable job of explaining the activities of the elections department. His presentation and the answers to the questions were forthright and credible and while it would be nice to see the position of County Auditor held by a Democrat or possibly even better, to become a non-partisan office, Greg's answers certainly reflected an attitude that demonstrated his commitment to a completely fair and open election process.