Glitch botches voter registrations Spokane County to redo cards for 234,000 voters Related stories

Jim Camden - Staff writer

Spokane voters should ignore the voter registration cards arriving in the mail this week.

Your name and address should be right, as is the place where you'll be voting this fall. But most of the other information is wrong.

Spokane County Auditor Vicky Dalton said Monday a computer error had resulted in the elections office sending out 234,000 voter registration cards with bad information. That's one card to each of the county's registered voters, and none of them is completely right.

The Elections Office didn't discover the mistake until the $35,000 mailing began arriving in local mailboxes.

The programming error resulted in all voters' cards listing them as being in the 3rd Legislative District, which is in central Spokane; School District 80, which is in and around Tekoa; and Fire District 1, which is in the Valley. Even city voters are listed as living in the unincorporated region.

"You know the saying: If you really need a problem, you need a computer," Dalton said.

Elections office workers spot-checked the names, addresses and polling places to be sure they were correct, she said. But no one checked the additional information on legislative, school, fire and water districts.

If they had checked even one card, they would have realized the mistake.

The company that does the programming for the voter records, Data Information Management Systems of Newport Beach, Calif., has identified the error and is making corrections, company president John Hyce said Monday afternoon.

It will take two or three days to make sure the program is working correctly before running a new set of cards. After further checks, new cards should arrive sometime in August.

"As it stands right now, we are fully prepared to pay for all of it," Hyce said of the cost of remaking the cards.

Dalton said the Elections Office was deluged by callers who noticed the information was wrong on their cards and wanted to know why.

"There's a lot of people out there who do know their district. I'm heartened by that," Dalton said.

But some of those callers were critical of the auditor's office for letting the mistake slip by.

Barbara Keevan, a Spokane voter who handles performance evaluations for a local insurance company, said she was amazed the office didn't first do a test run on some of the precincts they were combining.

"In private industry, you always do a test run," Keevan said. "And you don't just check the obvious things."

Glitch botches voter registrations Spokane County to redo cards for 234,000 voters Related stories

Jim Camden - Staff writer

Spokane voters should ignore the voter registration cards arriving in the mail this week.

Your name and address should be right, as is the place where you'll be voting this fall. But most of the other information is wrong.

Spokane County Auditor Vicky Dalton said Monday a computer error had resulted in the elections office sending out 234,000 voter registration cards with bad information. That's one card to each of the county's registered voters, and none of them is completely right.

The Elections Office didn't discover the mistake until the $35,000 mailing began arriving in local mailboxes.

The programming error resulted in all voters' cards listing them as being in the 3rd Legislative District, which is in central Spokane; School District 80, which is in and around Tekoa; and Fire District 1, which is in the Valley. Even city voters are listed as living in the unincorporated region.

"You know the saying: If you really need a problem, you need a computer," Dalton said.

Elections office workers spot-checked the names, addresses and polling places to be sure they were correct, she said. But no one checked the additional information on legislative, school, fire and water districts.

If they had checked even one card, they would have realized the mistake.

The company that does the programming for the voter records, Data Information Management Systems of Newport Beach, Calif., has identified the error and is making corrections, company president John Hyce said Monday afternoon.

It will take two or three days to make sure the program is working correctly before running a new set of cards. After further checks, new cards should arrive sometime in August.

"As it stands right now, we are fully prepared to pay for all of it," Hyce said of the cost of remaking the cards.

Dalton said the Elections Office was deluged by callers who noticed the information was wrong on their cards and wanted to know why.

"There's a lot of people out there who do know their district. I'm heartened by that," Dalton said.

But some of those callers were critical of the auditor's office for letting the mistake slip by.

Barbara Keevan, a Spokane voter who handles performance evaluations for a local insurance company, said she was amazed the office didn't first do a test run on some of the precincts they were combining.

"In private industry, you always do a test run," Keevan said. "And you don't just check the obvious things."

http://205.235.133.31/news-story.asp?date=072401&ID=s996376&cat=section.spokane

-- Carl Jenkins (somewherepress@aol.com), July 25, 2001