State election officials keep close watch on registrations

• Published October 10, 2008

OLYMPIA - Questions keep coming up about voter registration practices in Washington state, but not at the scale seen after the disputed governor's race in 2004.

At that time, 1,678 illegal votes cast by felon, deceased and other ineligible voters came into play in a razor-close election decided ultimately by a judge.

The Evergreen Freedom Foundation said Thursday in Olympia it recently found a half-dozen underage voters' registrations listed as "active" in Washington's statewide voter database - the result of a policy that lets 17-year-olds register early, then be activated at the first election they are eligible.

State election officials said there is no cause to worry - that the names had been flagged, and the state's 39 county elections shops are poised to catch the ineligible voters, keeping them from getting a ballot.

David Ammons, spokesman for Secretary of State Sam Reed, said staffers are confident that problems can be avoided, since no underage votes slipped through in the 2007 general election or in the recent August primary.

Ammons also said the state has "cancelled about 482,000 voter registrations for various reasons, including about 160,000 felons, dead people and duplicates" since opening a statewide database in 2006.

"Over the same period, we added roughly 713,000 registrations to 'active' status, including brand-new registrations, and those who moved from inactive back to active status."

The dispute between EFF and Reed now is headed to court after a hearings judge backed up Reed's position that underage voters can register early. EFF is a conservative Olympia-based think tank that has dug into the voter-registration issue since the 2004 election, and EFF attorneys are pressing Reed to stop accepting the early registrations.

An EFF researcher found four underage voters cast ballots in the February presidential primary, 108 who voted since 2000 and 16,000 underage voter registrations entered into the system from 2000-08 period.

In a separate issue, the Building Industry Association of Washington found numerous felon voters who cast ballots improperly in the 2004 election, and hundreds of bogus voter registrations filed in October 2006 by workers tied to ACORN, a liberal national advocacy group that did voter outreach locally in the 2006 election cycle.

ACORN on Tuesday was implicated in other voter-fraud allegations in Missouri.

The local ACORN case, spurred by BIAW's investigations and eventual investigation by King County prosecutors and the U.S. Attorney's Office, led to felony indictments against seven former ACORN employees last year, of which some pleaded guilty.