“While the administrative errors that occurred in the hotly contested governor’s race were identified, these errors are unacceptable,” said Patterson, who chairs the council’s Labor Operations and Technology committee. “We need additional common sense safeguards to help prevent human error which jeopardizes the precision of our election process.”

“The integrity of the elections process is at the heart of our democracy, said Councilmember Lambert.” “Public trust must be restored through the careful examination of the process and corrections made where needed. We must act to recover the public’s trust.”

“I’d like to thank councilmembers Patterson and Lambert for recognizing that we need thoughtful, reasonable improvements, not radical change in elections,” said King County Executive Ron Sims. “These are the types of common-sense actions we need to evaluate as we work together to improve elections processes in King County.

“I have asked Dean Logan to work with these council members to see what actions would be necessary to fully implement these proposals,” said Sims.

The bi-partisan election reform package includes legislation:

• Requiring provisional ballots to be formatted in such a way as to distinguish them from standard ballots and to prevent machine tabulation before the ballots are verified. Currently there is no way to distinguish between a standard ballot and a provisional ballot issued at a polling location. 348 provisional ballots were improperly fed into ballot tabulation machines before the voters’ registration status could be verified.

• Directing the Executive to establish a space plan to centralize election facilities to improve efficiency and minimize the opportunity for mistakes and present the draft space plan to the Council for review. Currently the elections department operates out of multiple facilities and is not integrated or centralized, posing communication and operational challenges.

• Increasing funding for the training of temporary and full time employees to reinforce proper procedures in handling ballots, staffing polling locations and managing voter registration lists.

• Directing the Executive to examine the feasibility of conducting an election entirely by mail in King County. King County operates 400 polling locations and issues hundreds of thousands of absentee ballots during a General Election. This requires the administration of two separate election systems and increases the complexity and cost of conducting elections in a county of 1.2 million registered voters. Nearly 70 percent of all voters vote by mail and this number continues to increase.

The Council has already passed legislation requiring the Elections Department to report on the progress being made in implementing improvements to the council on a quarterly basis.

Patterson and Lambert also introduced a motion advocating that state law be amended to move the Primary election at least one month back from the third week in September. Washington State’s primary election occurs just six weeks before the general election, requiring election workers to certify the Primary Election and prepare for the administration of the General Election concurrently. Washington currently has the latest Primary election in the Nation. Secretary of State Sam Reed has proposed moving the Primary election as part of a statewide reform effort.

“The challenge of administering two elections in less than two months is exacerbated in King County where up to 1.1 million ballots are handled, 80,000 new voters are registered, 2600 different ballot styles are formatted and over 500 polling places are prepared, all within approximately 50 days, said Patterson. Scheduling the latest primary in the nation increases the risk or error in our elections.”

This is not the first time that Patterson and Lambert have partnered on high profile, bi-partisan legislation. In 2002, the pair sponsored legislation to create a Commission on Governance to take a comprehensive look at the structure and operations of King County Government. Regional labor, business and civic leaders, who made up the Commission, presented their recommendations for reforming County government to the Council last year.

“While the political concern surrounding this election has been fierce, the stewardship of our election system should be guided by principal, not by partisanship,” said Lambert.

“The public’s confidence in the election system is paramount to the integrity of our democracy,” added Patterson.