GOP surge likely to fall short

A Republican push in the closing days of the campaign doesn’t seem strong enough for Spokane County Commissioner Phil Harris or State Rep. John Serben to overtake Democratic challengers.

With the number of uncounted ballots dwindling, Harris and Serben can’t win re-election without pulling large majorities in the remaining votes – larger than they’ve seen at any previous count.

“I could still win, but I doubt it would happen,” Harris said Sunday. “It’s just the craziest election I’ve ever seen.”

Serben seems on track to get close enough for an automatic recount against Spokane School Board member Don Barlow, although not pull into the lead.

Neighborhood activist Bonnie Mager’s lead over Harris seems likely to stay ahead of the one-half of 1 percent margin that state law sets as the benchmark for an automatic recount.

The Republican surge did provide a victory for Spokane County Assessor Ralph Baker, who trailed Democratic challenger Judy Personett by 880 votes on election night and now leads by nearly 5,600.

But Personett and Baker were separated by only about 1 percent of the vote in the initial tabulation, and a lead that small often disappears.

Mager and Barlow both had more than 53 percent of the votes in that first tabulation, when the biggest single batch of ballots was counted. Until last year, when a large portion of Spokane County voters still went to the polls for major elections, that type of lead would have been considered large enough to guarantee a victory.

But in 2005, Spokane County voters opted to go to all-mail voting, like most of the counties around the state. Candidates and campaign strategists didn’t know then, and still can only guess, how that changes the dynamics of an election.

Some had speculated the margins for the candidates would change even less in counts after election night. With everyone having the same 18-day window to vote, an equal number of Democrats and Republicans would be early birds, and an equal number would procrastinate, some strategists said. With ballots coming in for weeks, the pool of voters who can be swayed would also shrink with each passing day making a “late hit” less effective.

In the closing days of the 2006 campaign, however, Washington Republicans started talking about a mighty push to get their voters to the polls or to drop their ballots in mailboxes. Reports issued by GOP headquarters in Bellevue talked of record numbers of voters contacted – 87,000 on Saturday and another 88,000 on Monday.

They were buoyed, state Chairwoman Diane Tebelius said, by national polls that essentially were signaling things weren’t as bleak for Republicans as the news media were saying. President Bush’s approval ratings were improving, Sen. John Kerry’s “stuck in Iraq” comments seemed to be hurting Democrats and some Republicans who had been saying they wouldn’t vote were changing their minds, she said.

“Our base is coming home and that is critical in the closing days of this election,” Tebelius said.

The Republicans weren’t alone in their campaign endgame, which is traditionally known as get-out-the-vote. Democrats, too, were exhorting volunteers at almost daily rallies to knock on a few more doors, make a few more calls.

Harris speculated that Democrats voted early, in part because their campaigns were urging them to cast ballots as soon as they arrived, while “Republicans, as usual, didn’t vote until later.”

There’s no way to check that theory. It’s true that some Democrats mailed brochures to voters as soon as the ballots arrived, urging them to mark their ballots and send them back right away, but some Republican candidates had the same message. At both parties’ campaign events, almost every hand would go up when candidates asked the crowd who had voted.

National Republicans were making claims similar to Tebelius’, with White House political adviser Karl Rove insisting up until Election Day that the GOP would not lose control of Congress. Rove was wrong, but recent vote totals suggest the state Republicans weren’t just whistling in the dark, and that may have shown up in a few races like the county commissioner’s contest.

On election night, when the ballots being counted were primarily those that had been mailed prior to the weekend before Nov. 7, Democratic challenger Mager finished with 53.25 percent of the vote to incumbent Harris’ 46.75 percent of more than 79,000 votes cast.

The next two days, the elections staff counted about 17,000 ballots, most of which would have been mailed the previous Friday and Saturday, and Harris had a slight edge, picking up about 50.5 percent of those votes. But the numbers were small, so that wasn’t enough to cause much shift in the overall percentages.

Then came the counts on Nov. 11, 13 and 14, which mostly included ballots mailed the day before and the day of the election. Harris won those counts with 54.4 percent, 55.7 percent and 54 percent, respectively, essentially standing the election night totals on their head.

By last Wednesday, elections staff was slowly counting “problem” ballots, ones received throughout the mail-in period but set aside because the computer could not read them. They may have been marked with pencil or the wrong color ink, had stray marks or writing on them, or been torn, and had to be “remade” by having the marks transferred onto a blank ballot by elections staff.

Those ballots also tend to be handled in the order that they came in, so the earlier ones were counted first. Mager’s totals went up above 50 percent the first day and hit 52.3 percent the next, so the average started reflecting the overall pool of ballots.

In Friday and Saturday’s counts, however, which likely had more of the problem ballots cast closer to Election Day, Harris moved ahead, although not by the margins he saw the previous weekend.

Similar shifts happened in the legislative race between Barlow and Serben. Although Barlow led by a slightly bigger percentage than Mager on election night, Serben did slightly better than Harris on most subsequent tabulations, and now trails by 327 votes, which is less than two-thirds of 1 percent of the votes in that race.

Both races remain close. Depending on the exact number of ballots that will still be counted, Harris would need between 66 percent and 72 percent of the votes to have a chance to overtake Mager; Serben would need 60 percent to 62 percent of the remaining ballots to finish ahead of Barlow.

Even without a recount, the results won’t be final until Nov. 28.