Another Election Day...

...another attempt by Republicans to hijack voters' rights. I stopped home yesterday on my way to the DNDA Links to the Community fundraiser (DNDA is the Delridge Neighborhood Development Association, and they're doing some really great stuff here in our 'hood--from some fantastically designed and community-oriented affordable housing to rejiggering an unused elementary school into an arts and community center) and met my neighbor, S, walking her dog. She stopped and asked, "Has your voter eligibility been called into question?" Hmmm. That's not something that normally comes up in conversation, so I asked what was going on. Seems that S was one of almost 1,900 folks that received challenges from the GOP as to their voter registration validity.

In particular, S said that the challenge from King County GOP Vice Chairman Lori Sotelo (who I believe S said initialed the challenge sent to her) noted that S's address was not a residence.

Say what? S owns her house (right next door to our very yellow Cracks Centraal) and has owned her house for many years. It turns out that the GOP was attempting to target a number of voters who had been registered at mailboxes or storage units. But it seems to have gotten out of hand. And now they're backpedalling. Here's an update from today's Seattle Times:

Republicans admitted Friday they made numerous mistakes in challenging the registrations of 1,944 King County voters last week.

The party dropped its challenges of 140 voters, and state GOP Chairman Chris Vance said more probably were challenged erroneously.

King County elections officials said they were flooded with hundreds of calls Thursday and Friday from confused and angry voters who had received notices from the county that their registrations had been challenged because of Republicans' questions about their address. Many said the challenges were unjustified, elections director Dean Logan said.

He urged them to vote in Tuesday's election anyway, and said their votes will be counted if their registrations turn out to be legal.

Vance apologized to voters whose registrations were challenged mistakenly but said Republicans were motivated by a desire to avoid a repeat of problems that plagued the county elections office last year.

And here's a piece from the Seattle P-I article:

"I'm extremely disappointed and angry at the audacity of this woman and the party she represents," said Demene Hall, who got one of the letters. Hall has lived for 16 years at the Watermarke apartment building at 320 Cedar St. in Seattle, her registration address.

Hall, who said she is "too African American" not to be a regular voter, said Friday she came of age in the civil rights era and watched her parents hand out political fliers outside polling places they were not allowed to enter.

"We just buried Rosa Parks on Wednesday, I got the letter on Thursday and today is my 57th birthday," she said. "And they're challenging my validity?"

Vance acknowledged that the inclusion of the Watermarke on the list was a mistake. Elections officials late Friday said Sotelo had rescinded 140 of the challenges.

This all stems from the fall out from last year's gubinatorial race; again, from the P-I:

The state GOP sued in January to overturn the results of the November 2004 election for governor, in which Democrat Christine Gregoire defeated Republican Dino Rossi by 129 votes after two recounts of more than 2.8 million ballots statewide.

In the ensuing trial, Republicans spotlighted mistakes in counting votes in King County, which included overlooking more than 100 absentee ballots until it was too late to count them, tabulating several hundred provisional ballots without the required verification of voter eligibility beforehand and failing to reconcile the number of ballots and the number of voters. They also cited the hundreds of tabulated ballots that were cast by felons barred by law from voting.

It's a rainy day here in Seattle, and Mrs. F and I are hunkered down and doing in-house projects, so we haven't seen S yet today. I'm hoping she's one of the 140 who had their challenge dropped. S also said that she was interviewed for KIRO-TV (channel 7 here in Seattle) for last night's news, but don't know if she made it on. Hopefully I'll have good news in the next day or two.