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:
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.
As an overseas voter from King County, WA I must tell you that King County won a prestigious award for how they handled their absentee ballots.
My ballot has always arrived in a timely fashion so that I have been able to vote and return my ballot without problem.
Your article doesn’t mention that the Washington State gubernatorial contest was one of the largest vote-getting contests in the state’s history and that King County is the most populous county in the state.
I’m not apologizing for Dean Logan, but he was vilified by the Republican Party because of the close vote, the same Republican Party that caged votes, falsified affidavits, and got no punishment and very little bad press.
Unfortunately, there will never be a “perfect” election. We need to make them as good as we can, but recognize that they will never be perfect.
As someone who worked at King County for many years, what happened during that election had less to do with Logan and more to do with the total mess he inherited. A computer system upgrade program that was in shambles, and a system that the previous Supervisor was fired for. He was pulling pearls out of the septic tank of years of accumulated system and personnel problems. You need to do some independent research before you jump on blame wagon. Oh, and in Snohomish County THERE the votes percentages were magically reversed between parties in only those precincts with electronic voting machines. The shame is that Gregoire’s win was way under counted.
I’ll jump on the blame wagon right now. It’s the electronic vote tabulation devices that fail over and over and over again, and the enablers are the officials that allow them to continue.
Electronic Vote Tabulation Devices need to be outlawed.
Officials that cry about cost, and other fascist reasons need to be held accountable for the damage that has happened to our entire nation because of these flawed, failed, rigged, unvalidatable pieces of garbage. They have cost us $100 Trillion Dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives, and the complete destruction of the US Constitution.
heckuva a job, Logie; he’s as qualified to be the LA Registrar as Brownie is to be head of FEMA. Same pattern of failing people upwards so that citizens condemn the government and then the installed failures in turn justify signing massive contracts for privatization of government functions.