Anchorage Daily News

After two years of battles over whether the state correctly counted votes in the 2004 general election, the Alaska Democratic Party has concluded it's impossible to tell.

And a Superior Court judge agrees.

The party sued for the 2004 records and got a copy of the state's electronic vote file last year. But it never got accurate vote totals broken down by state House district, said Kay Brown, spokeswoman for the Alaska Democratic Party.

"We were never able to resolve what happened in 2004," Brown said. "We still don't know."

In a recent order directing the state to pay the Democrats' attorney fees, Judge Stephanie Joannides wrote, "the system, as it existed prior to this litigation, failed to provide sufficient means of confirming the accuracy of the results."

The state Division of Elections maintains its vote count in 2004 was accurate, but admits the results were reported to the public in confusing ways.

For instance, early votes for a number of races and ballot measures were not reported by House district, but by each of the state's four election regions. The total of early votes for the region then showed up for every House district, inflating the actual number of votes cast many times over.

That's why in the U.S. Senate race, Sen. Lisa Murkowski was credited with 226,992 votes in a district-by-district total, but the count in the statewide summary was just 149,446, the Democrats say.

Murkowski, a Republican, beat former Gov. Tony Knowles, a Democrat, in a fiercely contested race. Knowles got 139,878 votes, according to the statewide official count.

Election officials say each vote was counted just once, not multiple times, no matter how it looks. They attempted to explain the quirks in a series of notes posted on the state Web site.

"We've contended all along those votes were accurately counted. It's the reporting that caused confusion for people," Shelly Growden, election systems manager, said of the 2004 vote.

Around the country, the reliability and security of voting machines have been under question for years. Evaluations in California and Florida earlier this year found serious security weaknesses, including in systems similar to Alaska's.

That prompted Alaska Lt. Gov. Sean Parnell to seek a study here, Growden said. The Division of Elections contracted with University of Alaska researchers to study whether the Diebold machines used in Alaska are vulnerable to hackers and other security breaches.

The results of the project's first phase are being released today.

The system already is improving.

Right after the 2004 election, state officials recognized the problem and changed their reporting practices, Growden said.

And for the 2006 election, Judge Joannides ordered the division to make backup copies of the electronic central vote file at various intervals, so the election history can be better tracked. It didn't do that in 2004.

In April 2006, after months of asking for it, the Alaska Democratic Party sued the state to get the central vote file. Five days before the matter was to go to trial, the division agreed to hand over the vote file.

Last month, Joannides ordered the state to pay $14,000 to the Democratic Party for attorney fees, in part because of the lawsuit's role in improving Alaska's election system.

"This court was not asked to rule on whether the Division of Elections' process for counting votes was inaccurate, and this order does not presume to do so," the judge wrote.

"However, it is clear that the value of Plaintiff's action has been to make the Division of Elections' process more transparent, more verifiable and more accountable."

While the election is long over, Brown said it's perplexing that the division never provided results that added up correctly, when it's responsible for doing so.

"I don't know what it means about the validity of the election. I just know that there are some very strange results that have never been explained," Brown said.

Even now, she said, the state could run the paper ballots from 2004 through scanning software that is correctly programmed.

Impossible, Growden said. Once a system for reporting votes is programmed in, it can't be changed after the fact, she said.

Find Lisa Demer online at adn.com/contact/ldemer or call 257-4390.

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