By Mahlon Meyer
Northwest Asian Weekly
Halei Watkins, King County Elections communications officer, stands in front of the secure cage were ballots are stored. (Photo by Mahlon Meyer)
Frank Irigon believes he lost his bid for a seat on the Newcastle City Council in part through exclusionary tactics that stigmatized his history of supporting Black Lives Matter and the anti-Asian Hate movement, as well as his age. This is perhaps the first time his long history of activism has worked against him.
“I wasn’t about to renounce my values and beliefs,” he said.
Because of the 0.30% difference in total votes that separated Irgon and his opponent and ultimate victor Paul Charbonneau, it triggered a mandatory machine recount. The recount determined that Irigon fell short by 10 votes.
Irigon supported increased public safety and was opposed to new taxes, and he said there was such stigmatizing of him that prevailed with voters.
Charbonneaut’s campaign platform, for instance, included the phrase, “The young can do it,” said Irigon. “That’s ageism.”
Charbonneau graduated in 2020 from Occidental College, where he was on the varsity football team. During a debate on Oct. 19, Charbonneau said, “Given my age, I don’t have the luxury of not planning for the future.”
Charbonneau later offered what he said was an “apology” on his Facebook page. But it also seemed to reinforce a disparaging message.
“I realized after further thought that me using that phrasing during the forum with our two images next to each other and given our age difference was suggestive of something more… morbid, and potentially came across as about you and not about me like I intended,” Charbonneau wrote the following day. “I would never intentionally speak about you or your health in that way.”
Irigon was a revolutionary leader at the University of Washington (UW) where he transformed the student government, promoting inclusion of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI). While a member of the ROTC, he attended anti-war protests. He also led protests to save the Chinatown-International District and founded the pan-Asian periodical, “An Asian Family Affair.” Later, Irigon served in leadership positions in prominent AAPI organizations for over 20 years, including one that helped with substance abuse in the community. After winning many awards throughout his life, he has been awarded the UW’s Odegaard Award for individuals who have led the community in promoting diversity.
Although Irigon lost by only 10 votes, he does not plan to run again. He noted he was asked by several prominent politicians to run. Instead, he will continue his activism, such as advocating for affirmative action plans in the Bellevue School District.
Still, Irigon does not think stigmatizing candidates as veteran social activists is the way of the future.
“This is not a harbinger of things to come,” he said. “For us Democrats or even mainstream Republicans, we all share the same values of diversity, equity, and inclusion, but we have to work harder to educate people.”
Perhaps one way to do so would simply be encouraging them to vote—for local races.
The recount
Given the closeness of the race, the law mandated a recount, which revealed that 154 ballots had been left empty in the sections for this particular race.
“This means that all those people didn’t vote for either Paul or myself,” said Irigon.
But Irigon, who joined the U.S. Army directly after high school, never gave up hope.
At 10 a.m. on Nov. 30, he watched staff of King County Elections check every “undervoted” ballot on a pair of computer screens.
Undervoted ballots come in many different forms. Sometimes, a square might contain a stray mark, like a diagonal line. When that happens, the controller at the computer pulls back from his careful vigil, his colleague stops also, and he magnifies the entire ballot, so that the rectangle is no longer isolated.
In one case a reporter witnessed, a voter had simply drawn giant Xs over parts of the ballot, indicating he wasn’t even taking the trouble to vote for those races.
Zooming in again, the ends of those Xs became fragments of lines in the individual rectangles—a classic undervote.
In the Newcastle recount, Irigon watched as the computer software system zeroed in on the boxes in each ballot where the voter failed to fill in a choice.
The empty boxes scrolled in columns down the screen as the staff members ran their eyes over one.
The recount took only 15 minutes.
A recount is triggered by the difference in the number of votes. A machine recount occurs when there is a difference of less than 2,000 votes and less than ½ of 1% of the total number of votes for both candidates. For a hand recount, there must be a difference of less than 150 votes and less than ¼ of 1% of the total number of votes for both candidates.
In the race for the Newcastle City Council Position, seat No. 6, Irigon had 1,662 votes, Charbonneau, 1,672. That made a 0.30% difference in total votes cast—rendering it a machine recount.
“As you observed, for machine recounts, our team is going to confirm undervotes but not actually count anything by hand,” said Kendall LeVan Hodson, Chief of Staff at King County Elections, in an email.
The system
The ballot counting system is intended to capture the vote of anyone willing to cast a ballot—so long as the intention is clear.
Recently, for instance, a voter mistakenly filled out a page from the voters’ pamphlet and mailed it in. King County Elections carefully examined it according to law and determined it was valid.
Recounts are likewise accessible to almost anyone.
Any candidate, political party, or even a group of five voters can ask for a recount—no matter the difference in votes.
But when asking for a recount, the charge to the requester is 25 cents per voter.
Securing each vote is also paramount.
Fifty security cameras hang overhead along with numerous webcams.
“We consulted banks and casinos,” said Halei Watkins, communications officer for King County Elections, who was the guide.
Each ballot runs through one of a pair of sorting machines, which are as long as school buses. Named respectively by staff members “Stars” and “Stripes,” each machine can handle 40,000 ballots an hour. They scan for any irregularity in the signatures on the outside of the envelope in which a voter mails in a ballot. If any occurs, the envelope is set aside for a staff member to examine by comparing it with a signature in an electronic database matched with his voter registration or application for a driver’s license.
The envelopes that are found to be sound are milled open by the machines so that the previous ballots can be extracted.
The next phase is bundling all ballots onto carts and trudging them into a secure cage the size of a small building. The cage consists of a floor-to-ceiling chain link fence, thick with hanging security cameras, and is accessed only by doors that require the simultaneous use of a security card and the pressing of one’s fingerprint into a flange.
Eventually, the naked ballots are fed into another scanner in another room. Here, their images are recorded so that an electronic facsimile can be transferred to a set of ultra-secure servers in a sealed room.
The secure servers sit behind thick glass windows and a doubly-sealed door.
When not in use, the door has a tiny red zip tie with a yellow number on it that loops between the door and its frame. If the seal is broken, staff will immediately know someone has entered the room without authorization.
To further prevent unauthorized entry, the number on the zip tie is recorded by the last person to use the room in a log that resides on a table besides the door.
When a hand recount is required, workers enter the cage where old ballots are stored—law requires they be securely kept for 60 days in local elections—and pull them out.
“And teams of two actually count all of those ballots by hand and confirm they match what the scanning equipment tabulated,” said Kendall Hodson, Chief of Staff, King County Elections.
The facility, which was formerly a Boeing plant, has attracted countless visitors. Outside the complex is a large world map beside a map of the United States.
Both maps are dotted heavily with clusters of cut-out circles of paper indicating the geographical origins of visitors to the facility.
Worldwide, it appears the only country from which King County Elections has not received a visitor is Russia. Recounts, like general elections, must be certified by a canvassing board, which includes Director of Elections Julie Wise, a representative from the Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, Kevin Wright, and from the King County Council, Janine Weihe.
In the case of the Newcastle race, the mandatory recount was certified on Dec. 6.
“But there’s still a lot to be optimistic about,” said Irigon. “Younger people are moving in, and they have a strong sense of social justice,” he said.
Mahlon can be reached at info@nwasianweekly.com.