Counting the ballots, take 3

OLYMPIA – As the state prepares to hand-count nearly 2.9 million votes, Republican lawyers want to be sure that the delicate ballots are treated with kid gloves.

No, wait – that’s plastic gloves.

In an e-mail to county auditors Sunday, Republican counsel John White Jr. asked that the hundreds of workers handling the ballots wear plastic gloves.

“This will reduce the risk of smudges from skin oils, dirt or other materials that may become lodged under a worker’s fingernails,” he wrote. “Plastic gloves will also reduce the risk of damage to punch-card ballots from long, sharp, or broken fingernails.”

Such precautions take on a newfound importance in a race like this, where Gov.-elect Dino Rossi, a Republican, leads Democrat Christine Gregoire by just 42 votes after a count and a recount.

“It’s serious business and we’re very serious about it,” said Pierce County Auditor Pat McCarthy.

On Monday, she and other election officials tried to reassure voters that this second recount will be handled fairly and smoothly. This won’t be the state’s first hand recount, although it will be by far the largest.

“This is going to be a long, tedious process, but it’s a process we’ve done before. Just not of this magnitude,” said King County elections director Dean Logan. If all goes well, election officials say, this third and final tally of the votes should be done by Dec. 23. The new governor is supposed to take office Jan. 12.

In most counties, the people tallying the ballots will be election staffers and temporary clerical staff. But hundreds of others will be partisans recommended by the Democratic and Republican parties. At King County’s 80 counting tables, one Republican will be paired with each Democrat, and a county election worker will record the count. Any disputes will go to the county’s election canvassing board.

“We won’t be negotiating at the individual tables about voter intent,” said Logan. All workers, including the party representatives, will swear an oath to be fair and accurate.

The recount starts Wednesday, but election officials have been preparing for days – hiring workers, renting folding tables, cordoning off areas for party observers. In King County, Logan’s staff leased empty office space for as many as 300 people. Over the weekend, workers there built a kennel-like steel cage to hold the ballots. Police will guard the ballots around the clock.

Snohomish County Auditor Bob Terwilliger is trying to negotiate a way to avoid having to print tens of thousands of poll-site ballots that were recorded only on a computerized voting machine. Yakima County is doing the same thing.

Actual counting won’t start until late this week or later, because the first order of business is simply to sort the millions of ballots.

In Spokane County, that sorting begins at 8:30 a.m. Wednesday. Ballots will be divided up by precinct, and then by what type of ballot they are: poll, mail-in, or “provisional.” Ballots will be further divided into piles that are clear votes for Gregoire, or Rossi, or Libertarian Ruth Bennett. Yet another pile will be ballots with no mark at all in the governor’s race. And another will be for ballots with two or more of the candidates marked.

With all that to do, Spokane County doesn’t expect to actually begin counting until Friday.

Complicating matters further, however, will be yet another pile of ballots: the questionable ones. These might be marked for a candidate, but not clearly enough for a vote-counting machine to read.

In Spokane, for example, voters use fill-in-the-oval cards. But if the ink was the wrong color, or too light, or the oval wasn’t completely filled in, the machine might have missed it. Or maybe the voter changed his or her mind, filling in an oval for Rossi and then crossing that out and filling in the Gregoire oval. In such a case, the machine wouldn’t count either choice.

In order to set a statewide standard for considering those questionable votes, the Democratic Party last week filed suit in the state Supreme Court.

“The basic concern is that all ballots be treated the same across the state,” Spokane County Auditor Vicky Dalton told members of the county elections canvassing board Monday.

Republicans say the Democratic lawsuit is an unfair attempt to change the rules of the game. A Sunday poll conducted for the Republican Governors Association suggests that most voters agree. By 68 percent to 25 percent, those polled said that only ballots counted in the first two tallies should be included in this second recount. By a thinner margin of 51 percent to 45 percent, pollster Stuart Elway said, voters said that Rossi was the legitimate winner and that Gregoire should concede the race.

The Supreme Court will hear arguments in the election case sometime in the next few days. Dalton said any precincts with questionable ballots won’t be counted until the justices rule.

Logan said that if the court orders counties to reconsider those questionable ballots, it probably wouldn’t make a dramatic difference in the results of the race so far.

However, he said, “what you’d see is a lengthier process” that probably wouldn’t be finished until sometime in January.