The hand recount of Snohomish County votes in the governor’s race will begin Monday morning and could be completed by Thursday, nearly a week faster than originally thought.
Workers on Thursday finished sorting through cardboard boxes to account for all the mail ballots and the printed result tapes from electronic voting machines. The task took two days and should make tallying of votes go a bit smoother, county elections officials said.
Following a meeting of the county canvassing board Thursday, Auditor Bob Terwilliger announced election workers would get today off and return Monday to count from 8:15 a.m. to 5 p.m.
He said tallying should conclude on Wednesday, and the canvassing board is scheduled to meet at 2:30 p.m. Thursday to certify the results.
The counting takes place in the tabulation center at 1818 Pacific Ave. It is open to the public.
Most of Washington’s counties began their third and final tally of the governor’s race on Thursday, scrutinizing stacks of ballots by hand to see if any mistakes were made in the machine recount of some 2.9 million ballots.
With 11 of the state’s 39 counties reporting results by Thursday night, Republican Dino Rossi posted a net gain of 11 votes over Democrat Christine Gregoire.
Rossi, a former state Senate Budget Committee chairman, beat Gregoire, the state’s three-term attorney general, by 261 votes in the first count, then by 42 votes in an automatic machine recount.
Democrats are paying for a statewide hand recount that is expected to cost more than $1 million. Six counties started on Wednesday, and most of the others started on Thursday.
As of 5 p.m. Thursday, Ferry, Garfield, Grays Harbor, Jefferson, Lincoln, Mason, Pacific, Pend Oreille, Skamania and Wahkiakum counties had reported results, giving Gregoire 28 new votes and Rossi 29, while Libertarian Ruth Bennett lost two votes.
Kitsap County completed its hand recount too late on Thursday night to immediately post its results to the state Web site, www.vote.wa.gov, but The Sun of Bremerton reported that Rossi picked up a net 10 votes.
Kitsap recorded an additional 154 votes in the hand recount over what the county’s three scanners picked up in the machine recount. Rossi got 82 of those and Gregoire got 72, Kitsap County Auditor Karen Flynn said.
The county’s 10-year-old optical scan equipment failed to detect faint pencil markings on those 154 votes, county officials said.
Election workers in King County, the state’s largest, spent a second day sorting ballots by precinct on Thursday and expected to begin the actual recount this morning, starting with votes cast at the polls. That’s expected to take several days, then absentee ballots will be recounted.
Dean Logan, the county’s elections director, said he expects the recount of nearly 900,000 votes to wrap up a few days before Christmas – unless the state Supreme Court tells counties to take a second look at ballots previously rejected by canvassing boards. If that happens, he said the recount would stretch into January.
Pierce County also spent Thursday sorting its ballots and expected to begin recounting them Monday. “This kind of work, if people get tired, mistakes happen,” Auditor Pat McCarthy said. “We can’t push people beyond an eight-hour day.”
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