Mistake sends some counties scrambling

OLYMPIA – A mistake by state elections officials is prompting some counties to reprint thousands of ballots, driving workers and printers into overtime and testing a deadline for getting ballots to overseas voters.

The error, in an advisory from the secretary of state’s office, caused some counties to print ballots with statewide initiatives in the wrong order, officials said Tuesday.

State Elections Director Nick Handy characterized the error as “very, very technical,” and advised county officials not to let corrections interfere with deadlines for delivering absentee ballots.

“If I were an auditor and I had a choice between having my ballot in the proper order and getting them out on time, I’d get them out on time,” Handy said.

State elections officials and county election managers were scrambling to deal with the problem Tuesday afternoon, with the Nov. 8 general election about a month away.

Absentee ballots have to be in the mail by Oct. 21, and elections officials try to have ballots to overseas and military voters 30 days before the general election.

Most of the state’s counties have switched to all-mail voting, meaning an extensive reprinting job lay ahead for some, said Pam Floyd, the assistant state elections director.

“This just makes me ill when I think about it,” Floyd said. “We just missed it.”

However, counties shouldn’t suffer financially from the mistake, because the state pays administrative election costs in odd-numbered years, Handy said.

King County, which has about a third of the state’s registered voters, had not yet begun printing ballots because its primary race for sheriff is in a recount, spokeswoman Hilary Karasz said.

“We were doing editing anyway, so it didn’t matter,” she said.

In Kitsap County, officials were hustling to rework 136,000 ballots. The county’s printer said the job could be finished in time, but the work will cost overtime rates, as will extra county staff hours.

Kitsap County Election Manager Dolores Gilmore said she’d rather not send absentees with the error, because she believes ballots should be uniform statewide.

“That’s not what you want to do if there’s any way to avoid it,” Gilmore said.

In Yakima County, officials were able to stop the printing process just after their printer made plates for the countywide mail-in ballots.

But they still must retest ballot scanners and electronic voting machines to make sure the systems work with the revised ballot.

“We’re starting basically over again … but I think we’ll manage,” said Election Manager Diana Soules, in charge of roughly 93,000 ballots. “We’re still on track to get ours out at this point.”

The error appears to be the only ripple of difficulty so far in this year’s elections, which are under increased scrutiny following problems uncovered during the extremely close 2004 governor’s race.

Handy said the problem highlights the challenge of preparing for general elections so quickly after the Sept. 20 primary. Washington’s turnaround between the two elections is the second-fastest in the nation, after Hawaii’s, he said.