WENATCHEE – Democrats’ court fight to preserve Gov. Christine Gregoire’s victory focused for a time Tuesday on Snohomish County, where hundreds of ballots were found weeks after the election.
County Auditor Bob Terwilliger testified in a Wenatchee courtroom about how an election worker found the 224 ballots in a mail tray stacked beneath several empty trays. They were eventually counted and included in the county’s final vote totals, he said.
“I was very confident that they had gone through our normal process,” he said under questioning from Democratic attorney Kevin Hamilton. “There was nothing about the process that gave me concern about their security … or that they came from somewhere else.”
Republican Dino Rossi and the state Republican Party are suing to overturn Gregoire’s 129-vote win, arguing the ballot-counting process was riddled with mistakes such as what occurred in Snohomish County.
They contend the sum of illegal votes and misconduct by election officials changed the outcome. They want Chelan County Superior Court Judge John Bridges to void the election.
The trial, which began May 23, is scheduled to end Friday.
Democrats contend that there were plenty of flaws but no fraud that should compel the judge to act.
On Tuesday, Washington’s director of elections, Nick Handy, took up most of the day providing a spirited defense of the election process and those running it.
He described ballot-counting woes as “inadvertent mistakes” and “errors of human beings” committed under pressure of deadlines to certify results and intense scrutiny of partisan observers.
“I am not aware of any conduct that moves beyond the inadvertent level,” said Handy, who works for Secretary of State Sam Reed.
The strategy of Democrats is to show that errors occurred everywhere in Washington state, including Snohomish County, where Rossi collected 6,439 more votes than Gregoire.
Terwilliger acknowledged Snohomish County certified results the first time Nov. 17 that showed a total of 24 more votes cast in four precincts than voters registered in those precincts. They were in Everett, Mill Creek, Marysville and Edmonds.
Terwilliger said that was a record-keeping issue. Lists of names for precincts had to be drawn up before every registered voter had been added to them. When the lists were complete there were no cases of more votes than voters.
Much of his 50-minute testimony Tuesday centered on the Nov. 22 discovery of the 224 absentee ballots. He described the county’s process of tracking absentee ballots from receipt to counting.
Terwilliger admitted this audit failed to alert them to the missing ballots.
“If we frankly had not been in the machine-recount environment we probably would have found those ballots sometime this month or later than we did,” he said.
Attorneys did not ask Terwilliger about votes cast by 24 felons and in the names of four dead people. He confirmed in answer to one question that workers found three unopened ballots days before the trial started. Those remain sealed and uncounted.
Answering a question from Hamilton, Terwilliger said he believed the results certified Nov. 17 accurately reflected the number of ballots received and counted.
“Were you right?” Hamilton asked.
“Apparently not,” Terwilliger replied.
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