Re-recount bails out some voters

The guberna- torial re-recount will have people chanting “Every Vote Counts” for years to come, but it also is teaching us a corollary: If you want your vote to count, you better follow the instructions.

This was evident as elections workers sorted, dealt and stacked some 200,000 ballots in Spokane County over the last week. If not for the manual recount, some people’s votes would have never been entered in the tallies because they just couldn’t fill in an oval properly. Or fill in at least one oval. But not fill in more than one oval.

Most school kids are familiar with the drill from their multiple-choice standardized tests. If the question is, “Who should be the next governor?” one should darken in the oval next to the name of the candidate that is their best-guess answer.

Picking a candidate is, in fact, akin to answering a really hard trig question where you think you did the all the steps right, but have to wait for the test results to see if you came up with the right solution. You may think you know which candidate will do the best job, but you have to wait until they’ve been in office for a few years to see if they live up to expectations.

Just like those standardized tests, a voter can’t pick two answers for the question. A few voters filled in the oval for one answer, or rather candidate, changed their minds, crossed it out and picked another one. The computer can’t read their minds, and so it grades it as no answer to that question. (Remember, the test computer doesn’t let you pick more than one answer, either. Otherwise, high school seniors could finagle perfect SAT scores by filling in all the bubbles on their test sheets.)

Although some Republicans have denounced the hand recount as less accurate than the machine recount, this type of mind-changing is something a human eye detects better than a machine. Humans also can interpret some other marks, like Xs next to the names rather than ovals filled in. Or, one of the favorites turned up by Spokane elections workers, the voter who circled the R or D party labeling after chosen candidates’ names, rather than filling in the oval.

This happens in every election, by the way. But perhaps 999 times out of 1,000, candidates win by such big margins that there’s no need to check on the ballots that the machines couldn’t read. This election, of course, those ballots could be the difference between saying Gov. Rossi or Gov. Gregoire for the next four years.

Some people might argue that voters who can’t follow simple instructions don’t deserve to have their ballots counted this year. Too bad, so sad, they screwed up, they lose out.

Maybe, but doesn’t that sound a tad elitist – particularly in a country where folks love to go around before the election proclaiming “Every vote counts”?

We’re famous

The gubernatorial recount is such a curiosity nationwide that two members of the Election Assistance Commission showed up last week to watch the recount in King County. That’s a federal elections agency created after the 2000 presidential race.

We’ll know we’re in real trouble, though, if former President Jimmy Carter shows up this week with a team of observers from the United Nations.

This just in

King County has discovered another 50 votes in the Christmas stockings decorating the elections office. Apparently they’re from a precinct of elves, and were set aside until J.R.R. Tolkien could be found to check their signatures.

Lots of support

President Bush’s choice for Homeland Security czar, Bernard Kerik, crashed and burned last week. But he did much better with his choice of Sam Bodman for energy secretary.

Bodman garnered praise from such diverse quarters as the petroleum industry, the alternative energy folks and the Sierra Club. He’s a former deputy secretary of Commerce and Treasury, a business leader and a former prof at MIT.