On Thursday, Dec. 4, the San Juan County Elections Department conducted a hand recount of the District 4 Council Race, as per my request. I did not expect the results to change. I was trying to provide an audit of a system that is being questioned.
Some San Juan County voters do not want the unique bar code on their ballots. The county council voted 5 to 1 to have that bar code removed. Some of the other concerns are: a lack of trust in the security of the ballot scanning software, frustration that one cannot vote at a polling station on election night, voters were never asked if they wanted to change to mail in ballots and observers of the counting process are limited because the counting room is too small and centralized on San Juan Island.
The Elections Department told me there was no margin of error for the scanning software and hardware that tabulates the San Juan County ballots. The good news is the hand count revealed that people are just as accurate as a scanner and possibly faster.
Now the question is: why are we using a scanner? All ballots are visually inspected by two people before being scanned. If a ballot is rejected by the scanner, elections workers determine what was intended and make a duplicate ballot for the scanner to read. In the time spent inspecting and feeding ballots into a scanner, the ballots could be counted manually. During these tough economic times, I suggest the county send back the hardware and software currently being used and return to manning live polling stations on Election Day.
The voting process was intended to provide secret ballots with a public count. San Juan County is doing the opposite. Our ballots have unique identifiers that link our name to our vote and then all ballots are counted in a centralized location with limited access for observers. With a 90 percent voter turn out, voters should demand a system that they can trust.
Mindy Kayl lost to Richard Fralick in the San Juan County District 4 County Council race. In the final count of the 1,921 ballots cast, Fralick received 947 votes, Kayl received 827 votes, and there were 12 write-in votes and 136 undervotes.
