I served about five hours as a Republican observer of the manual vote recount in Spokane County. I compliment Auditor Vicky Dalton and her staff for an orderly, professional management of the recount, but I have several observations to offer about the election process.

First, voters need to take greater responsibility for casting their ballots properly. I saw far too many ballots marked in strange ways that required examination by the canvassing board. Voters need to take the time to read the ballot instructions and mark their ballots correctly.

Second, some voters seem determined to waste their votes. I saw several ballots on which voters cast a straight party ticket except for writing in a name for governor.

In some instances, I concluded that the voter was simply being cute. To me, this implies a lack of seriousness about the responsibility we have as citizens to cast a thoughtful vote.

Voters should also assume responsibility for registering properly and updating their registration as needed by change of name or residence.

Close elections such as our governor’s contest expose procedural problems with the electoral process in nearly all the counties. The surge in new registrations in this last election cycle probably stressed the recording and validating process in all counties.

The election-reform committee Gregoire said she plans to create should review this process very carefully and recommend procedures to screen out ineligible registrants.

The problems encountered in King County, while not limited to that county, require special examination if only for the reason that 31.2 percent of the ballots cast for the three main candidates for governor came from that county. Those problems include 700-plus “misplaced” ballots “incorrectly rejected,” 348 provisional ballots fed through counting machines before they could be verified and some 1,800 more ballots than voters listed on the election rolls as participating in the election.

Judging from comments by election officials in other counties, these problems are not necessarily unique to King County or to this election.

The attitude of the King County elections administrators toward these discrepancies is troubling. Elections Superintendent Bill Huennekens has stated that the news of these problems should not call the election into question because the results were “99.9” percent accurate. Unfortunately, with the margin of victory at a .0045 percent, 2,148 questionable ballots or 2.5 percent of the ballots cast in King County might matter a great deal.

With regard to the 348 provisional ballots counted before validation, are these officials saying that their precincts are so poorly staffed that folks can walk in, get a ballot, mark it and feed it into a counting machine without identifying themselves? Some of the 1,800 excess ballots are attributed to voters who “forget to sign in” at the precinct. How do they get a ballot without signing in?

Regarding the reconciliation of the number of ballots cast with the number of participating voters, King County Elections Director Dean Logan is quoted as saying, “The process of crediting voters is a post-election administrative process that has no bearing on the authenticity of the election results.”

The logic of that statement eludes me. The inability to account for “non-signers,” “military ballots” cast by military personnel not registered in the county and mystery provisional ballots at the very least are evidence of lax election procedures in King County and reveal a bureaucratic mindset that small procedural errors don’t really make a difference. Unfortunately, in the case of this election those small errors did matter.

Gregoire’s new committee has much work to do. At the top of its list, however, should be restoring public credibility to the election procedures in King County.