SEATTLE – Dozens of election observers kept close watch Friday on teams of King County vote counters as the state’s largest county began its hand recount of the governor’s race.
Republican Dino Rossi, a commercial real estate agent and former state Senate Budget Committee chairman, beat Democratic Attorney General Christine Gregoire in the first count by 261 votes, then in a machine recount by 42 votes.
Democrats are paying for a statewide hand recount of the approximately 2.9 million votes cast in the state. Most counties began that count on Thursday. With 17 of Washington’s 39 counties reporting results by 5 p.m. Friday, Rossi had posted a net gain of 28 votes.
The count is expected to be finished by Dec. 22.
Democratic gubernatorial candidate Christine Gregoire said she would not contest results of the statewide hand recount.
“I’ve said all along, 42 votes out of 2.9 million is literally a tie,” Gregoire said Friday. “I want every legitimate vote counted, and when that gets done – hopefully by Dec. 23 – the race will be done, and I will live by the results.”
Mary Lane, Rossi’s spokeswoman, said she’s not sure she trusts Gregoire to stand by the results of the second recount.
“I have to take what she says with a grain of salt,” Lane said. “I think everybody does.”
In King County, seated at folding tables spread out across a huge, brightly lit room, each member of the three-person counting teams wore color-coded badges: Democrats’ were fluorescent green, Republicans’ were purple and nonpartisans’ were blue.
As they went through each box, counters separated ballots into six piles: Rossi, Gregoire, Libertarian Ruth Bennett, write-ins, “overvotes” – ballots with two candidates picked for one race – and “undervotes” – those with no candidate picked in a race.
Wearing her orange observer badge, Rosemary Allen sat close to the yellow rope line that separated one of several designated areas for about 100 observers in a room King County leased out of an office building near Boeing Field.
Nothing she noticed rubbed her the wrong way, but she was still glad to be part of the watchdog crew making sure the tedious manual recount of nearly 900,000 county ballots goes off without a hitch.
“If I were going to be governor for the next four years, I would want to know that the count was as accurate as it could possibly be,” said Allen, a 51-year-old accountant and Democratic volunteer from Seattle.
Jim Brady, a Republican observer, said he spotted a few things that concerned him, including one worker who came up with the wrong count for a stack of ballots. The error was detected because each stack of ballots is counted by two people to make sure the same count is reached twice.
Still, Brady said he’s concerned a manual recount won’t be as accurate as a machine recount.
“There are so many ballots to count. Two people can make the same mistake,” said Brady, 72 a retired forester from Issaquah.
Dean Logan, King County’s elections director, circulated throughout the room and said he was impressed – but not surprised – to see things going smoothly. “So far so good,” he said.
The rules were strict, and people were following them diligently, Logan said. All personal belongings had to be checked in a coatroom upstairs. The only beverages allowed were ones with tops that could be closed, and they had to stay on the floor.
Auditors in several other counties said they had no trouble enforcing similar rules.
Whatcom County Auditor Shirley Forslof said she was alarmed earlier this week when election workers found seven unopened, uncounted provisional ballots that had been cleared by a canvassing board but accidentally placed in a pile of empty envelopes. “You always presume that everything’s been thoroughly sorted and checked and double-checked,” she said.
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