Races tighten as votes counted

State Rep. John Serben closed the gap with Democratic challenger Don Barlow in ballots that were counted Tuesday, and County Commissioner Phil Harris remained close to Democratic challenger Bonnie Mager.

Both Republican incumbents benefited from strong surges among ballots that have been counted since election night, and the two could overtake their challengers if those trends continue in the remaining ballots.

Barlow’s lead of nearly 2,000 votes on election night dwindled to just 548 votes after Tuesday’s tabulation. The Spokane School Board member had more than 53 percent of the votes initially counted in the race for a state House seat in the 6th Legislative District. That ratio flipped, and more than 54 percent of the ballots counted since election night have favored Serben, a first-term legislator.

Mager, too, has seen her lead dwindle, from about 5,000 votes on election night to a current gap of 1,743 votes. The neighborhood activist had collected about 53 percent of the votes in that first tabulation, which was primarily ballots mailed prior to the weekend before the election. Harris, a three-term incumbent, has received about 55 percent of the vote in the subsequent counts, which mainly consist of ballots received on Election Day or in subsequent days.

In the Spokane County assessor’s race, incumbent Ralph Baker widened his lead over Democratic challenger Judy Personett to about 5,000 votes in Tuesday’s tabulation. Personett led Baker on election night by about 900 votes but fell behind in ballot counts last week.

None of the other races in Spokane County changed enough Tuesday to give trailing candidates a chance of overtaking the likely winners.

County elections officials counted about 3,600 ballots Tuesday and estimate they have about 15,400 remaining. Most of those are ballots that can’t be read by the computer – usually because of stray marks or writing – and have to be duplicated onto blank ballot sheets, Elections Manager Paul Brandt said.

“It’s a fairly time-consuming process,” Brandt said. To duplicate or “remake” a ballot requires two election workers. One reads the voter’s choice, and the other marks those choices onto a blank ballot; they then switch ballots and reread the voter’s choices to double-check the new ballot.

He expects election workers to be able to remake about 3,000 ballots per day, and daily counts will continue until all the ballots have been tabulated.

About a third of the ballots counted Tuesday were duplicated ballots. The remainder were those that were properly postmarked and recently received and processed by the elections office. Most of those came from the 4th, 6th and 7th legislative districts, Brandt said.