If Election Close, State Tally May Be Delayed

If the presidential race is as close as some analysts believe and Washington state is truly a tossup, the country could be waiting and watching for days - or even weeks - to know who the next president is.

Several unusual circumstances would need to occur for Washington state to play such a pivotal role in the selection of the next president. But elections officials said Monday that those things could easily happen in a year like this.

The scenario goes like this:

Suppose neither Al Gore nor George Bush have a majority of Electoral College votes after the polls close in the nation’s three eastern time zones tonight. Gore is expected to win California and Hawaii, Bush to win Alaska. But Washington and Oregon are both considered tossups and could be the last states where the outcome is in doubt.

Oregon requires voters to mail their ballots early enough to have them in elections officials’ hands by Election Day. But Washington state only requires mail-in ballots to be postmarked by sometime today.

That means as many as 900,000 mail-in ballots won’t be processed and counted until some time after tonight, said David Brine, a spokesman for the Washington secretary of state’s office.

Absentee ballots usually follow the same pattern as ballots cast at the polls - but not always. Close local races have been known to swing back and forth in the absentee counting.

State law requires county auditors to count as many absentee ballots as possible within three working days. But Friday, the third day, is Veterans Day, a state holiday this year.

That means some auditors won’t count their first batch of mail-in ballots until next Monday and will do successive counts every three days after that.

“They won’t be counted all at once,” said Brine. “If a race is close on election night, it could be close until Thanksgiving.”

Actually, it could be close longer than that. State law says counties must certify their election results by Nov. 22. But the law also requires an automatic recount in close races.

If Gore and Bush are separated by less than a half of 1 percent statewide, the recount would be done by the computers that already have counted the ballots.

But if they are closer than one-fourth of 1 percent, the law requires a hand recount of all ballots. That could be a total of 2.6 million ballots, if turnout projections are correct.

Such a scenario would turn the national spotlight on Washington state for weeks.

“We’d have a lot of people breath ing down our necks,” Brine said, if the scenario plays out. “But accuracy is more important than speed. Our county elections officials are not going to get bullied and stampeded into doing things they don’t normally do.”