Gregoire leads by 10 and counting

OLYMPIA – Democrat Chris Gregoire got two early Christmas presents Wednesday. A preliminary total of the state’s hand recount of the governor’s race shows her 10 votes ahead of Republican Dino Rossi.

And the state Supreme Court said hundreds of ballots that were held out of the count through the mistake of King County elections workers can be added to the mix.

Gregoire, who finished the first tally of votes 261 behind Rossi and a machine recount down by 42, leads the manual recount for the first time since it began last week.

The court’s ruling means that before this latest – and presumably last – recount is final, King County should verify the signatures on absentee ballots that were incorrectly kept from previous tallies.

King County officials said they expect to have those ballots checked and counted by some time today. But that doesn’t mean the gubernatorial election will end, even if Gregoire gets the kind of boost she’s been receiving from her electoral stronghold throughout the recounts.

Republicans who back Rossi could cry foul and go to court.

“Chris Gregoire is dreaming if she thinks Dino Rossi is going to concede,” state GOP spokeswoman Mary Lane said before the court held its unusual Christmas week hearing on the latest wrinkle in the race.

After a 90-minute hearing, the high court tossed out a lower court’s ban on processing some 735 absentee ballots that election workers had incorrectly assumed had unverifiable signatures. The recounting process allows for elections officials to correct such mistakes, the court ruled.

Arguments during the hearing boiled down to a pair of similar sounding positions with a potential for very different outcomes.

Every vote should be counted, said King County elections officials, state Democrats and Secretary of State Sam Reed, a Republican. Those King County ballots may well be from absentee voters who did everything right, but were rejected based on mistakes by elections officials, they said.

No, every valid vote should be counted, argued state Republicans, who contended that the temporarily lost ballots weren’t valid.

“Nobody’s proud of the mistakes King County has made. But we should be proud of a system that allows mistakes to be corrected,” said Thomas Ahearne, an attorney for Reed.

That system would allow the King County canvassing board to add those ballots to its overall totals if the county has signatures on file that match the signatures on the ballot. Elections officials were supposed to check their files for those signatures weeks ago, but the ballots were misplaced and the checks never made.

Mistakes happen, countered Harry Korrell, an attorney for the state Republican Party, which obtained a court order blocking those ballots from being added into the mix of some 2.9 million statewide.

“It is impossible to imagine that this could have been done without mistakes,” Korrell said. But the time for “expanding the universe” of ballots to be counted is over, he added.

Before the hearing, nearly 100 partisans stood on the steps outside the court building to wave signs and chant slogans suggesting what they should do.

“Count every vote. Count every vote,” shouted Democrats.

“Even the idiots?” replied Republicans, who questioned whether voters who can’t follow instructions deserve special treatment.

Inside the courtroom, however, some justices questioned whether the case involves mistakes by elections workers who didn’t check the right files, not voters. When Korrell argued that King County had essentially rejected the ballots by not including them in previous tallies, Justice Faith Ireland interrupted him.

“You’re not seriously suggesting King County can disenfranchise voters for their administrative convenience,” she said.

The county should “bend over backwards” to verify absentee voters’ signatures before the first results are certified, he said. “At this late date, it is too late to revisit a decision about validity,” he added.

Those voters could contest the election after the manual recount is completed and a winner declared, Korrell argued. But if Rossi is ahead without them being added in, he should be declared the winner.

“There’s a big difference between being declared the winner and being declared the loser and having to contest the election,” Korrell said.

“Shouldn’t we be looking at it from the point of view of the voter?” asked Justice Susan Owens.

Republicans also have “serious concerns” about the security for those questioned ballots. They may have been left in an open tray outside a locked enclosure one night, Korrell said.

Janine Joly, attorney for the King County elections office, said the ballots have been in a secured facility guarded around the clock by sheriff’s deputies.

Within two hours, the court came back with its decision: King County can check available records to see if the voters have signatures on file. If they do, the canvassing board has the authority to add them to the county’s tally. With the state’s other 38 counties already reporting, and the other 900,000 ballots from King County tabulated, the formerly misplaced ballots will be the last added to the mix.

The exact number of ballots to be added is unknown. The number of misplaced ballots grew from 573 to about 735 over the last week. Joly said elections workers have verified signatures for about 580 of them.

Before the justices ruled, all sides involved in the case began trying to predict the next phase of the election that has dragged on for seven weeks after Election Day. Rossi was declared governor-elect on Nov. 30 but will lose the title if Gregoire wins the hand recount.

Reed said the final tally from this second recount should be the end of it, whether a candidate wins by one vote or hundreds. That person should be declared the winner, and the loser could take objections to the courts or the Legislature.

But Reed said the public might be unhappy with a winner being ratified by either of those bodies, and perhaps a new election should be held if serious questions still remain.

A new election could be held in early February or early March. Until then, Gary Locke could stay in office on an interim basis, or if he steps down, Lt. Gov. Brad Owen could fill in, Reed said.

Paul Berendt, chairman of the state Democratic Party, said there’s no legal authority for holding a new election. The state Constitution says a contested election is settled by the Legislature. If that’s the case, Berendt said, a Legislature with Democratic majorities in both houses would ratify Gregoire’s victory if she finishes on top.

On his afternoon talk show, radio host John Carlson, the GOP’s 2000 candidate for governor, said he believes Rossi should call for a run-off election, and told listeners he was confident that a majority of the state’s voters would turn against Gregoire because of the drawn-out process.

But Democrats stood ready to accuse Rossi and the Republicans of being two-faced, complaining about the Democrats’ court maneuvering when Gregoire was behind, then seeking a legal fix when Rossi came up short.