John Fund in today’s Wall Street Journal Political Diary E-mail…

Look Who’s Counting Votes in California

The race to determine who will be the attorney general of California is still too close to call. Democrat Kamala Harris, San Francisco’s district attorney, leads Republican Steve Cooley, the DA for Los Angeles County, by 31,000 votes out of nearly nine million cast. And there are more than 750,000 ballots left to count.

The tabulation process has led to a full-fledged food fight between the candidates and has roped in Dean Logan, the controversial voter registrar of Los Angeles County. Ms. Harris claims that Cooley officials have crowded election workers "and aggressively attempt(ed) to have ballots disqualified" in Los Angeles County. Cooley aides counter that election workers in Los Angeles are being far too sloppy in comparing signatures on provisional ballots with voter registration cards on file for that person. They allege that in some instances no comparison is being made.

Attorneys for Mr. Cooley also complain that county workers are contacting voters by phone to fill out incomplete voter registration forms in order that their provisional ballots can be made legal, a step that’s not part of the county’s written procedures for counting ballots. They also claim that Mr. Logan’s staff has held private meetings with Harris representatives and given them access to rejected provisional ballots.

Mr. Logan rejects all of the allegations. "I don’t believe there’s been anything raised at this point that is a significant concern," he told the Los Angeles Times. But Mr. Logan made similar soothing statements in 2004 when he presided over one of the great meltdowns of U.S. elections during his previous tenure as elections chief of King County, Washington, which includes Seattle. The Washington governor’s race that year entered the ranks of electoral infamy when Democrat Christine Gregoire was declared the winner over Republican Dino Rossi by 132 votes out of 2.7 million cast after three recounts.

The mess in those recounts made the Florida 2000 battle look orderly. In King County alone, there were more than 3,500 unaccounted-for ballots or voters. Some precincts had more ballots than voters, for a total of 2,900 extra ballots. Other precincts have more voters than ballots, for a total of 800 extra voters.

Other irregularities abounded. The Seattle Times reported that 129 felons illegally voted in King and Pierce counties. Some 55,000 optical-scan ballots (on which the voter marks a bubble) in King County were "enhanced" so that the voters’ supposed intent could be determined, with no uniform standard governing the process. And in an eerie parallel to Mr. Cooley’s complaints in the AG race in California, National Review noted that at least 348 provisional King County ballots — which were supposed to be closely inspected to see if they were legitimate — were directly fed into machines and counted. Bob Williams of Washington state’s Evergreen Freedom Foundation concluded that Mr. Logan was guilty of "practiced incompetence" in his unwillingness to follow proper recount procedures.

In July, 2005 the King County Independent Task Force on Elections, a body set up to probe the county’s vote-counting problems, concluded that Mr. Logan was "ill equipped" to make the changes needed to restore public trust and confidence in elections. A year later, Mr. Logan quietly resigned to take his new job in Los Angeles County.

Mr. Logan’s track record should raise concerns that proper procedures for vote counting are once again not being fully followed in California’s AG race. If prompt action to ensure the integrity of the election process isn’t taken now, we may see calls for Los Angeles County to appoint its own task force to investigate Mr. Logan’s "practiced incompetence."

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 16th, 2010 at 12:00 am and is filed under Blog Posts.