The motion adopted by the Council requests the executive to expedite implementation of legislation introduced earlier this year by Councilmembers Julia Patterson, Kathy Lambert and Bob Ferguson.

“While the administrative errors that occurred in the hotly contested governor’s race were identified, these errors are unacceptable,” said Councilmember Patterson, a sponsor of bipartisan reforms. “We need additional common sense safeguards to help prevent human error and improve the precision of our election process.”

“Since King County elections errors have been higher than many of us anticipated, we need to be the leading county in implementing change to restore integrity and accuracy in the voting process in order to regain public confidence,” said Councilmember Lambert.

“No one specific piece of legislation can fix the problems with our election system, but this is a step in the right direction,” Ferguson said. “We asked a citizens group to analyze and recommend changes to our election system. This reform proposal adopts many of their key recommendations and respects the great work of citizen volunteers who urged the Council to take action.”

The reform proposal includes:

• Evaluating the training needs of both permanent and temporary elections staff, developing an appropriate training curriculum.

• Preparing a space plan for consolidation of elections operations into a single facility, estimating the costs of consolidation and proposing a schedule for consolidation.

• Evaluating all of the resource needs for elections and presenting them in a report to the Council by August 1, 2005.

• Proposing several options to differentiate provisional ballots from regular ballots, including ways to prevent them from being inserted into optical scanning machines.

• Identifying a Countywide election that could serve as a test for evaluating the costs, benefits advantages and disadvantages of conducting all mail elections.

• Improved procedures for Election Day reconciliation, at the precinct level, of ballots issued, voters voting, and ballots cast, and presenting them in a report to the Council by July 1, 2005.

Read more about this legislation on the King County Council’s
LEGISEARCH system and type in “2005-0054”