Stray ballots keep election workers busy

VANCOUVER, Wash. – Ballots cast in Seattle shouldn’t be a factor at the Clark County elections office, but wandering ballots are keeping county elections staffers busy.

So far, 149,729 Clark County ballots have been processed, but ballots continue to trickle in. On Friday, Clark County got nine more ballots from King County. They’re from voters who are registered in Clark County but were in Seattle during the election.

Twenty-six Clark County voters have filed their ballots in King County this year.

“It could be somebody who moved up there, or it could be college kids,” said Tim Likness, Clark County elections supervisor. “They didn’t update their address, and it was too late to register there, so they would go to a location in King County and get a provisional ballot. If the person hasn’t cast another ballot, we will count that ballot.”

Processing those ballots is time consuming. Many of the candidates and measures on a King County ballot are out of bounds for Clark County voters.

“We will determine which precinct the person should have voted in, then look up which ballot the voter should have gotten,” Likness said.

Elections workers fill out a blank ballot with the voter’s choices in the eligible races. After ignoring King County races, what’s left is the statewide measures, the U.S. Senate race and the state Supreme Court race.

Out-of-county ballots are just one of the factors making a complicated election even more time consuming.

Some of the ballots cast by military or overseas voters also need to be duplicated when they are faxed or e-mailed into the elections office.

“We have to duplicate them so we can run them through our tabulating system,” Likness said.

And some ballots that can’t be read by the tabulating system must be duplicated, too.

“People use the wrong color ink,” he said. Maybe a fluorescent orange highlighter pen seems like an emphatic way to make your choice known, but “The system doesn’t read it,” Likness said.