For curiosity's sake

Nicole Way, the supervisor of mail ballot operations for King County (who is now on administrative leave after the discovery of a few significant errors in that operation), may testify tomorrow.

If only for curiosity’s sake, the petitioners’ lawyers should ask her a few simple questions:

• Did you obtain a report from your computerized election management and voter registration system, called “DIMS,” that stated how many absentee ballots had been accepted as valid?
  
• [If yes]: Was the number of valid ballots stated by DIMS greater or less than the number of absentee ballots tabulated in your computerized “GEMS” vote counting system?
  
• [If no]: Why not?
  
• Did the “GEMS” system have any ability to tell you whether the ballots sent through it had been accepted as valid during the ballot verification process?
  
• Did your GEMS system have the ability to tell you whether any absentee ballots sent through it had been rejected as invalid during the ballot verification process?
  
• Did your GEMS system have any ability to tell you whether any absentee ballots were accidentally sent through for vote tabulation more than once?

As noted earlier, Way’s deposition showed that the Mail Ballot Report was not just falsified – it was constructed in a way that didn’t indicate whether the ballots sent through the vote tabulation system were all valid, nor did it indicate whether any ballots had been sent through more than once.

The report should have shown the number accepted as valid – taking that information from DIMS and whatever other records Way found it necessary to maintain to have that data available.

Also, the report needed to state on a separate line the number of ballots that had been sent through GEMS to tabulate the votes on them.

Then, the reconciliation required a comparison of the number accepted as valid and the number sent through the GEMS vote tabulation system.

Only that comparison of information from two different sets of data would constitute a reconciliation.

What Way did was prepare a report which purported to show a reconciliation, but which actually reported nothing more than the number of times the GEMS system registered the act of scanning a ballot to tabulate the votes.

Sure, she also said they hand counted the stacks of rejected ballots; but there was no use of DIMS or any other data base to indicate what number of rejected ballots should have been in those stacks.

If the GOP lawyers wish to show that more ballots were sent through the vote counting system than had been accepted as valid, they ought to ask the right questions while Way is on the stand.

Update May 25: The archived audio recording of Way's testimony isn't yet available at TVW's web site, so I'll have to listen later to see if I missed it -- but it appears that the petitioners' lawyers weren't curious about the number of valid ballots recorded in the election management and voter registration system ("DIMS"). Odd: They didn't ask Huennekens about the Provisional Ballot Summary Report, either. The GOP needs lawyers who possess a little bit of curiosity.