SEATTLE — Since the 2020 presidential election, county elections officials in Washington have spent millions of taxpayer dollars to make it easier for citizens to keep an eye on them.
“Everything you’re seeing here is new,” Snohomish County Auditor Garth Fell said on a tour through the county’s new election processing center.
With an approximately $8 million price tag, the emphasis in the new space is on security and openness. The 17,000 square foot facility is much larger than the old ballot processing facility and includes much more glass.
“Throughout the facility, we’ve installed floor to almost ceiling glass so people can look into all of our processing spaces,” Fell said.
In King County, where the elections office added a 1/5-mile-long public observation loop years ago, officials have also stepped up transparency. They’ve added more live cameras that are already streaming elections operations now until the vote is certified in late November.
“We believe in radical transparency,” King County Elections Director Julie Wise said. “We’ve got over a dozen web cameras filming all of the areas of elections where we’re processing your ballot,” she said.
Plus, 85 security cameras are always rolling.
In addition, Wise has doubled the number of observers from political parties who will be allowed onto the secure, non-public floor of the ballot processing area. She’ll allow 12 observers at a time, and she expects to “beat a record number of “200-300 unique, different observers” to sign up for observer training in the next two weeks.
Wise also has a record number of 800 temporary employees on hand to process votes.
Republicans, who continue to claim there are vulnerabilities in Washington’s vote-by-mail system, are not swayed.
“I think more transparency is always good,” said Washington State Republican Party Chairman Rep. Bill Walsh (R-Aberdeen), but “so much of the questioning about election processes here happens before election day.”
Republicans continue to target Washington’s voter registration rolls and claim, without evidence, that potentially significant numbers of illegal immigrants, dead people, and phantom voters are casting ballots.
“A major concern in our state is who gets registered to vote and how they’re registered to vote and how those databases of registered voters are managed and maintained,” Walsh said.
Republican-led factions in Washington have been reviewing county election records and canvassing neighborhoods in a widespread search for improperly registered voters. The so-called voter integrity projects have resulted in the groups submitting thousands of names of voters to county elections offices who they claim may be fraudulently registered.
In a series of reports in 2022 called “The Fraud Crusade” the KING 5 Investigators debunked many of these claims, finding that voter integrity groups in King, Skagit and Mason counties made errors or misunderstood election laws.
Still, Walsh is undeterred. “There may not be a smoking gun. You know, abusive behavior may look like legitimate ballots, so it’s very hard to prove.”
Republicans want to end mail-in balloting altogether. “Ultimately, in-person same day voting would be the best help to make people more confident of the system and more inclined to participate,” Walsh said.
In Skagit County, local Republican party officials have been some of the state’s staunchest election deniers. Chairman Bill Bruch routinely posts outlandish theories about fraudulent algorithms in voting equipment, mail-in ballot fraud and stolen elections.
In October of 2022, KING 5 reported on errors by Skagit Voter Integrity Project (VIP). The group said it uncovered some 3,000 voter registration “anomalies.”
KING 5’s reporting revealed many of those voters were properly registered and their claims about voter’s “citizenship” status and competency to vote were grossly inaccurate.
This year, Skagit VIP filed more than 50 official voter registration challenges, a little used law until recently that allows citizens to trigger an investigation of a voter’s status. VIP’s Lorilee Gates presented evidence to Skagit County Auditor Sandy Perkins and her staff.
Her evidence proved that 34 of those voters had moved from their address but had not updated election records with a new address. Election records require that voters list their residence to receive a ballot by mail. The auditor’s office kicked all 34 of those voters off the registration rolls.
That’s 34 voters out of 87,641 registered voters in Skagit County. Elections officials say all of them seemed to be people who simply moved and forgot to update their address.
“Overall, (there’s been) no fraud or any malicious intent that we’ve been able to find,” said Skagit Elections Manager Gabrielle Clay.
Like other counties, Skagit has also moved its election processing center to a new, larger space that will allow more room for workers, party observers and the public to monitor the vote count.
“Seeing the process work is helpful. It helps alleviate any misinformation intentional or unintentional,” said Clay.
Nov. 5 will be the test for Skagit and other Washington counties to see if that’s true.
Watch the original Fraud Crusade series: