Sims seeks money for election facility, better training

King County Executive Ron Sims, holding his first press conference on problems with the Nov. 2 election, said this morning he plans to ask the County Council for more money to buy a new election facility and improve training of workers.

Despite his acknowledgement that some changes are needed, Sims defended Elections Director Dean Logan and came out swinging at those who have questioned the integrity of the election.

"I am deeply disappointed that so many have sought to take political advantage of human error and turn it into baseless cries of fraud and corruption," Sims said.

Sims and Logan shared the podium as they released Logan's 24-page report on the election. The report outlined reforms that are needed at the state and local levels, but provided little new information about a series of errors that have undermined public confidence in King County's election results.

Those errors included the mailing of duplicate ballots to some absentee voters; the mistaken rejection of some absentee ballots cast by voters whose signatures weren't found in a computer system; and the improper counting of some provisional ballots before the eligibility of the voters was verified.

"A thousand things went right," Sims said, "but a handful of things went wrong. Some mistakes were made, and we all regret that.

"But with every mistake we accepted responsibility, informed the public and, most importantly, took swift corrective action to ensure that every eligible ballot was counted."

Sims said a postcard will be sent to all King County residents, telling them how they can obtain the report.

He also said the search has begun for a property where the county can combine its now-scattered election operations into a single "state-of-the-art" facility.

Logan said he plans to create a "formalized" staff training program, update work procedures, beef up security, and build a "fully functional" communications center.

After Sims praised the county's "99.98 percent" accuracy in handling votes, he was asked what that number was based on. Logan said it was based in part on a discrepancy of 1,800 between ballots counted and voters known to have voted.

However, when that discrepancy was compared with the nearly 900,000 votes counted, blogger Stefan Sharkansky pointed out to Logan, the accuracy rate was actually 99.8 percent.

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