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Monday, November 7, 2005

More than 140?

Posted by on November 7 at 12:14 PM

For those just tuning in, a brief recap: Last week nearly 2,000 voters in King County received letters challenging their right to vote. Those letters were generated by the King County Republican Party, and were signed, “under penalty of perjury,” by an east-side woman named Lori Sotelo, who leads the Republcan’s “Voter Registration Integrity Project.”

Ms. Sotelo, it turned out, was wrong on at least 140 counts, which led to an embarrassing Friday for her and others in her party. The Republicans were going after voters who are registered to a storage unit or P.O. box — which is illegal — but they ended up challenging a significant number of voters whose registration addresses are obviously not storage units or P.O. boxes.

They’ve apologized for the 140 mistakes, and have withhdrawn those challenges. But might there be more mistakes on their long list of 1,945 voters whose registrations they challenged over the P.O. box issue?

This weekend I posted the long list, and asked people to email me if they had been wrongly challenged, but were not on the list of those getting an apology and a withdrawal of their challenge by the Republicans. I’ve now heard of a number of people who seem to have been wrongly challenged but are not on the list of 140. More on that later, but meanwhile…

Are the Republicans going through their longer list with a fine-toothed comb to make sure they didn’t issue more than 140 erroneous challenges? I just spoke to State Republican Party Chair Chris Vance, and the answer is no. “It’s the day before the election,” he said. “There’s nothing at this point we can do about it.”

However, he did seem open to the possibilty of withdrawing more challenges if we show there are more than 140 challenges that need to be withdrawn. So, again: Take a look at the list of 140. Then take a look at this list of 1,945. If you’re on the second, but not the first, and you think you’ve been challenged in error, email me.