Despite a String of Failures, The Acting Registrar Gets the Permanent Nod to Administer Elections in America's Largest Voting Jurisdiction....
By John Gideon on 7/9/2008, 8:35am PT  

Guest Blogged by John Gideon of VotersUnite.org

Why should anyone be surprised at yesterday's decision by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors that Dean Logan is the best qualified to be the county's permanent Registrar of Voters? After all, failed election officials seem to be sought after by counties. Michael Vu failed miserably in Cuyahoga Co., Ohio, where he even had two employees convicted of felony election violations. San Diego Co. tripped over themselves as they rushed to hire Vu to be their assistant Registrar.

In 2004 Dean Logan was the King County (WA) Election Director. Logan was the center of a fire storm that erupted due to the close gubernatorial race. In their reporting of Logan's new promotion from acting Registrar to Registrar, the Los Angeles Daily News reports:

In 2004, when Logan was director of Records, Elections and Licensing Services in King County, a political firestorm erupted after the closest governor's race in state history between Republican Gov.-elect Dino Rossi and Democrat Christine Gregoire.

The initial count showed Rossi had won by 261 votes, triggering a mandatory machine recount. The recount ended with Rossi ahead by 42 votes.

A few days later, Logan's office found 336 more ballots not previously counted, prompting Washington state Democrats to call for a hand recount.

In the ensuing weeks, Logan's office said it found more uncounted ballots and ultimately Gregoire won by 129 votes.

Afterward, Logan's office released records showing 450 people who had voted were not registered voters and that hundreds of provisional ballots were fed into voting machines without verification and by mistake, making it impossible to authenticate their legality.

The brouhaha resulted in lawsuits and some elected officials called for Logan's resignation, accusing him of mismanagement.

A year later and Dean was rescued by then LA Co Registrar Conny McCormack, who herself came to the county under the cloud of failings in her elections jobs in Texas. Conny hired Dean as her assistant. In August 2007 Conny announced her retirement and Dean was named acting Registrar later in the year.

Failures seem to follow Logan. He was in charge of the LA Co elections office when the "Double Bubble Trouble" incident took place last February on Super Tuesday, and thousands of legally cast ballots were left uncounted from the Democratic Primary. He was also in charge when our very own Brad Friedman attempted to vote on his polling place's supposedly disabled-accessible voting machine and the machine flipped four of his votes to candidates he hadn't voted for.

One has to wonder how many times someone can fail and still come up with the rewards, such as a $195,000 a year position counting votes in the most populous county in the country. Some people are truly Teflon coated. Amazing!...But not surprising.

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Article Categories: California, Los Angeles