Recount gets under way

Under the watchful eyes of both major political parties and several attorneys, Spokane County began recounting some 203,000 ballots cast in Washington’s historically close governor’s race Saturday.

As at least one Republican and one Democratic volunteer looked on, county election workers unsealed boxes of ballots cast on Election Day and fed them, one at a time, into the same type of machines that counted them at the poll site.

Behind the locked door of another room, other election workers, watched by other volunteers from each party, fed absentee ballots into other machines that had already counted those ballots after they had arrived by mail.

“You’re here to protect the position of your candidate, and that’s great,” County Auditor Vicky Dalton told some two dozen volunteers from the two parties at about 8:15 a.m. before the recount started. “But you’re also here to protect us.”

The Republicans – whose candidate, Dino Rossi, leads by 261 votes out of some 2.8 million cast after the first tabulation – sent an attorney from the state party and another on loan from the Bush-Cheney ‘04 campaign. State law requires the ballots to be recounted by the voting machines used in the election, and state officials are hoping to have results of the new tally by Wednesday.

Spokane, King, Klickitat, Pierce and Skagit counties began their recounts Saturday, and the other counties will begin on Monday. Results will be announced as each county finishes its recount. Klickitat County finished its count Saturday, and Rossi gained one vote.

Dalton asked the observers to follow some basic rules: No touching the ballots, or the machines that count them.

“No discussing politics, especially across party lines, because we don’t allow blood on the carpet,” she said. “No discussing the Apple Cup, because we really don’t want to clean blood off the carpet.” The football game between Washington State and the University of Washington was being played later in the day, and a few fans came dressed in school colors.

The rows of machines from the poll sites had been programmed to count only the votes marked for the governor’s race. Ballots that were not properly marked or left blank were pushed back out for election workers to inspect. Sometimes the machine said the ballot was blank – technically known as an undervote – but the voter had merely failed to fill in enough of the oval or marked it in some other way. Those were taken to a separate room, two election workers inspected the ballot and “enhanced” the mark so it could be read by the computer scanner.

Volunteers from each party also watched that process, and GOP attorneys scrutinized each ballot that was enhanced. Early in the process, Rossi picked up six votes that couldn’t be read until the ballots were enhanced, while Gregoire gained one.

Other times, more than one oval was filled in for the race, which is known as an overvote. “We’ve never inspected these ballots” from the polls, Dalton said before the recount started. “Expect to see some pretty interesting and creative activities by the voters.”

Within about two hours, she was proved right. A machine kicked back a ballot from Precinct 6027 that it registered as an overvote, because the voter had filled in the oval next to the candidate’s name in each race, and filled in the oval next to the “Write-In” space below. In each space, the voter had written in the name of the candidate he or she had selected above.

On election night, the machine read that as no vote for any of the candidates. In the recount, it will be counted as one vote for Rossi, because his oval was marked and his name was on the write-in space. But not two votes for Rossi.

It’s hard to know what that voter intended, Dalton said, but the law determines the way it will be counted. “We will have some of those. Not a lot, but a few.”

The full impact of the corrected undervotes and overvotes won’t be known until the recount is completed. Dalton initially had estimated that would be Sunday, but several hours into the process, she said it might take until sometime Monday.

A few of the machines were refusing to kick unmarked ballots back out, and instead depositing them in the locked areas inside the counting box without tabulating them. Opening the machines up to recheck the ballots would compromise the security of the count for those machines’ precincts, so all of the ballots from that poll site had to be taken out and resealed while the machines were repaired, reprogrammed and retested. The process is slow, but speed isn’t important, accuracy is.

At the end of a day of counting, elections’ workers discovered a problem with the tally for the absentee ballots. In totaling up the results of about 80,000 of those ballots, the days’ count showed too many write-ins.

“It was an impossible number of write-ins,” Dalton said.

In checking the machines, workers discovered that the test runs from Friday hadn’t been deleted from the scanners’ totals before the real counting began Saturday.

“We start over in the morning” with the absentees, Dalton said. About one-third of the poll site votes also remain to be counted. Barring any other glitches, Spokane’s recount should be finished Monday.