I read with interest ydra's diaries from the past few days.
Being a resident myself in a Washington county that is all vote by mail and having recently changed my county of residence, of course I was curious if this was a systemic problem.
Well, having just received my ballot adressed to myfirtname M mylastname, I can assure you that yes, with a strong definitely maybe that there is trouble in The Evergreen State.
I too like ydra used the online change registration option offered by the state.
To recap from ydra's diary:
I initially had registered using the motor-voter option when I renewed my drivers license back in 1992 when I first moved up here to the Seattle area. Then I moved from King county to Snohomish county and used the online registration to register in Snohomish county. It specifically said you do not have to unregister in your previous county and that was that. It used my drivers license number for verification. This is important.
When "Jim" looked up my registration, he at first thought maybe my signature might be the problem, but my signed F didn't really look like an "M" How can that be anyway? It used my drivers license number to pull my name and address from the DMV database. No human had to do anything. But Jim saw what he thought might have happened. He said, on the web page he was looking at, it had the last name, then gender field (M for male) on the first line, then the first name on the second line, and finally the middle initial on the third line.
Now I'm not stupid. Jim was trying to make me believe it was simple operator error, where some very stupid worker saw this:
Last Name: Canzler Sex (M)
First Name: Eric
Middle Initial: F
Well maybe it looked more like
NAME GENDER ADDRESS
Last: Canzler M 123 Maple street
First: Eric Anytown WA
MI: F 99120
And that could be confusing if you are very stupid. But some person was so stupid he thought my middle initial was M because it came after my last name. Furthermore, that person entered hundreds, maybe thousands of names like this and never noticed that every single name had either M or F as the middle initial.
Ok, plausible deniability, but I don't think anybody is that stupid. In fact I don't think it works that way at all. They don't have people typing in names from one computer database to another, they just do an extract from one database and import it into another.
Will my vote be counted?
I have calls in to my local county auditor, so an update is in the works ... but first my dog needs walkies!