County taking no chances with governor’s race recount

Elections officials around Washington made preparations Thursday to recount ballots in the gubernatorial contest between Dino Rossi and Christine Gregoire, the closest statewide race in Evergreen State history and apparently one of the closest in modern American campaigns.

Recounting will begin as early as Saturday in Spokane and many of the state’s more populous counties. That’s the two-day minimum set by law to notify the candidates and the political parties after Wednesday’s final tallies from all 39 counties left Rossi with a 261-vote victory over Gregoire.

“We’re going to go through all the hoops and all the steps because we don’t want to miss something,” said Spokane County Auditor Vicky Dalton, who scheduled the local recount to begin at 8 a.m. Saturday at the Elections Office, 1033 W. Gardner.

State law requires a recount in any statewide election with a margin of less than 2,000 votes. If the margin had been below 150 votes, the recount would have been done by hand; because it’s not, it will be done by the same machines that counted the poll ballots on election night, and the absentee ballots during the subsequent two weeks.

Some smaller counties with fewer ballots will be able to recount their ballots Monday and Tuesday. But Dalton and other elections officials in larger counties will begin on the weekend, even though it means paying some elections workers overtime.

“If we run into a problem, it gives us Monday and Tuesday, and part of Wednesday to straighten it out,” Dalton said. “I’m not taking any chances on having a piece of equipment blow up and not be able to count the ballots.”

She will have 22 workers on hand for the recount Saturday morning, but may not need them all Sunday. She estimated the recount will cost Spokane County about $10,000 in overtime.

In King County, 130 county workers will spend four days feeding ballots into tabulation machines, starting at 8 a.m. Saturday in an elections warehouse in Seattle. The cost of King County’s recount hasn’t been determined.

In a memo to observers, the King County officials warned that “the recount is not an adversary proceeding” and that “conversations are to be kept to a minimum.”

Dalton said she expected to have observers from both parties, and attorneys present for the Spokane recount.

Counties around Washington use a variety of voting systems, from the computerized scanners that read the blacked-in bubbles next to the candidates’ names in Spokane to punch-card systems. Fourteen counties still use the system that made “hanging chads” a household word during the Florida recount of the 2000 presidential election.

In Washington, recounts rarely change totals by more than a few votes here and there. In the first election after Spokane installed its new ballot-scanning computers in 2001, a Spokane City Council race was separated by 50 votes and required a recount. That process rejected four ballots with light markings that were previously counted and picked up five other ballots with markings that hadn’t been counted. The net result left Dennis Hession 49 votes ahead of Dean Lynch, instead of the original 50.

While a shift like that didn’t matter in the 2001 council race, which had about 16,000 votes, it could matter in the governor’s race. Rossi’s current margin of victory – his 261 votes divided by the 2,805,913 cast for the three candidates – is .0093 percent. Hession’s margin of victory over Lynch, by comparison, was about .3 percent, or about 33 times larger.

No statewide race in Washington history has ever been reversed in a recount, but no statewide race has ever been this close. And it is clearly one of the closest statewide races for a major office in American history, said Larry Sabato, a political science professor at the University of Virginia who has done extensive research on state and national elections.

The 1839 race for the governor of Massachusetts was decided by one vote. But only 102,066 votes were cast, so the margin of victory was .07 percent. And elections were different back then, both in terms of voting systems and limitations on who could vote.

In modern times, the closest race is probably the 1974 race for U.S. Senate in New Hampshire, which went to two recounts, Sabato said. In the first, Democrat John Durkin won by 10 votes out 221,838 cast; in the second, Republican Louis Wyman won by two votes – which would be a margin of .0009 percent, or about a tenth of the Washington governor’s race.

But that wasn’t a margin of victory, because both results were disputed. The Senate refused to seat either candidate and a special election was called for the following year. Durkin won that election handily.

In 2000, George Bush beat Al Gore in Florida by 537 votes out of 5.9 million cast, a victory margin of .0091 percent, which is just a hair closer than Rossi’s lead over Gregoire. Gore beat Bush in New Mexico by 366 votes out of 570,200, or about .064 percent – which is almost seven times more comfortable than the Rossi-Gregoire split.

In 1948, Lyndon Johnson won the U.S. Senate race in Texas by 87 votes out of 988,295 cast, for a margin of victory of .0088 percent. That election was rife with charges of voter fraud and ballot stuffing and earned Johnson the nickname “Landslide Lyndon.”

Elections now are much cleaner and charges of fraud are much less common. But Rossi’s margin is in the same neighborhood as Johnson’s, Sabato noted.

If his margin holds up, “it’s going to be Landslide Dino,” Sabato suggested.