Seattle, Washington FBI Bureau File - Paperless Archives

SHERIFF
KING COUNTY
Case # Unassigned
~ __________ ~ISTATEMENT
ACORN VOTER
REGISTRATIONS CASE
This is Detectivel
lof the King County Sheriff's Office. It's April 12 th , 2007. The time is
10:00 a.m. And present are Steve Hobbs, Arlen Storml I myself, I I
I landl l L....-____ ----'
DET.I
D go ahead.
All right. So the document that I handed out to you is a time line of
events, urn, related to the Acorn registrations that we received, urn, we
received them actually on October 9 th , 2006, which was one day past the
30-day cutoff for mail-in registrations in the State of Washington. Urn, so
we did not process them in time for the November elections. And we held
them aside, urn, following the end of November election for processing for
the next special election which would have been in February.
Urn, when we began, we bundled our registrations in batches of 50, just
for processing for this is for our data entry operators. And we started
reviewing the registrations we noted that the handwriting was
substantially similar on a large number of the registrations that we
received. Urn, and it was by, urn, in different batches of similar
handwriting, so it looked like a number of different registrars had filled out
the registrations. It's not unusually to have a registrar help a voter fill out
the upper portion but it is unusual to have them actually sign the
registrations as well. And the signatures on the registrations were in very
similar handwriting. Urn, we have provided those to the Prosecuting
Attorney's Office which I believe are with those boxes ...
STEVE HOBBS:
That's right.
.. . over there are. So, urn, we had a discussion with the Prosecuting
Attorney's Office about the registrations, urn, our perception is a large
number of these were fraudulent, looked like they had been signed by the
registrar. Urn, so we, to be honest, we're trying to (unintell words) if we
could just not put them in our database to start with because we didn't
want to have a bunch of dirty data or dirty registrations in the database
that we worked hard to clean.
Urn, we were advised by both the Prosecuting Attorney's Office and the
Secretary of State that we should go ahead and take them at face value
and enter them into our registration system, urn, and so we, uh, did start
doing that. We were also asked by the Prosecuting Attorney to, urn, do
some calls to some of these registrations to see if we could actually
contact the person and find, where it looked suspicious, to see if these