Salmon design tops voting for Washington quarter

OLYMPIA – The people have spoken, and they want the leaping salmon.

That’s the result – with more than 134,000 votes counted – of an opinion poll on three designs competing to grace the flip side of Washington state’s commemorative quarter.

Coming in first with nearly 45 percent of the vote was “Design Two,” which features a salmon breaching the surface of a lake in front of a tree-fringed Mount Rainier. It also displays “The Evergreen State” as a slogan.

Second place in the poll, with about 40 percent of the tally, went to a design incorporating the nickname and images of apples, Mount Rainier and a salmon within an outline of the state.

An American Indian-style drawing of a killer whale, playfully spouting water and raising its tail fluke, garnered about 14 percent of the votes.

But that’s not the final word. Gov. Chris Gregoire will decide the ultimate winner this month, with an announcement planned this summer after approval from the U.S. Mint. The quarter is slated for release next year.

The State Quarter Advisory Commission, led by the governor’s husband, Mike Gregoire, met Monday to make its design recommendation to the governor.

The commission received thousands of hand-marked ballots from schoolchildren and others, but most of the opinion poll’s votes came through a Web site linked to the governor’s Web site, said Mark Gerth, a commission spokesman.

That process was plagued earlier by robotic computer programs that cast more than one vote from a single computer address. Technicians suspended the voting for a few days after a barrage of repetitive votes swelled the tally past 1 million in one weekend.

The polling started anew, with features that made it more difficult to cast repeat votes and a promise to delete clear cases of ballot-box stuffing.