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Everett Herald - Published: Tuesday, December 20, 2005

All-mail balloting voted down - for now
Democrats say they will revisit the issue once they have a majority in January.

By Jeff Switzer
Herald Writer

A pitch to switch to all-mail elections was rejected by Snohomish County Council Republicans on Monday, but Democrats vowed to revisit the issue in January when they are in the majority. ...

... GOP members of the council forced a vote on the proposed all-mail legislation during their morning meeting, yanking it from Democrat Dave Gossett's afternoon operations committee.

"I'm not willing to disenfranchise 40 percent of the voters," Koster said. Voting is a precious right and mail-in ballots should be the exception, not the rule, he said.

The trend is going the other way, however.

Thirty-two of the state's 39 counties have switched to all-mail elections since the state Legislature relaxed rules this spring.

Nelson criticized mail voting as a source of fraud. He said 1,779 mail ballots were rejected during the general election.

A report shows that of those ballots, 1,176 were rejected because they were postmarked too late. ... (full article)

Isn't it interesting how desperately the Republicans want to keep their black-box voting machines. WA state Republicans have become knee-jerk slanderers... They make a habit of screaming voter fraud but never have a single real case to point to.

Obviously the electronic voting machines magical qualities are what attract the Republicans.

Evidence Of Election Irregularities
In Snohomish County, Washington, General Election, 2004

	Absentee ballots composing 2/3 of the total ballots showed a Democratic lead of 97044 to 95228 votes, while the remaining 1/3 of the votes, on touch screens, showed a Republican lead of almost 5% (50,400 Republican to 42,145 Democratic).
	Vote-switching and machines freezing up occurred in 58 polling locations out of approximately 148 total. There is a high correlation between the problem machines — as reported by KING5 news — and the Republican percentages the machines reported.
	Statistical analysis of machines that recently had their CPUs repaired shows a propensity for Republican voting that is present but weak on the individual level but strong at the polling location where the machines were placed.
	The average of the 58 polling places reporting vote switching, freeze-ups, or repairs within two weeks of the election was 11.58% more favorable to Republican Dino Rossi than absentee voters did, and averaged 10.8% more votes than Gregoire on election day, while RossiÂ’s overall spread among all electronic voters at all polling locations was under 5%.