Fraud possible in ballot count

A Dec. 3 letter may have been a little over the top.

The writer was a formal observer of the vote counting in Whitman County. She said, “Fraud was very apparent here.” The observations she cited did not support that.

If she had said that the conditions that she observed were perfect for concealing fraud, I would agree with her.

I observed similar conditions when I was an observer of the count at a recent election. The only difference was, we had to sit with our backs to the far window. Like the writer said, it’s so darned far away you couldn’t see Tiddlywinks.

The excuse for placing the writer et al behind the far window was probably related to the pandemic. The excuse for pasting me et al up against that window was to keep us from distracting the workers.

Unfortunately, the result is that I couldn’t tell what was going on. I was nervous, and somewhat miffed. I fault myself for not speaking at the time. If I were subpoenaed, and asked if the counting had been done in a fair and neutral way, I would have to testify that I had no idea.

There may have been fraud, but I had not been allowed to see what the eyes of the election workers were seeing, or what their hands were doing. I could testify only that the distancing certainly provided the secrecy needed to safeguard fraud.

The Whitman County Auditor doesn’t seem to understand the function of official observers. She certainly doesn’t respect that function.

Wiley Hollingsworth,

Pullman