While everyone's attention in the Rossi-Gregoire recount has been diverted to more pressing concerns -- the 561 mistakenly-rejected absentee ballots (including that of
County Council chair Larry Phillips) in King County, and the Democrats' lawsuit before the WA Supreme Court (
unanimously rejected this morning) asking to have previously-rejected ballots re-examined in all counties -- the counting continues across the state.
The added votes and the lawsuit have been admirably covered by SusanHu, and even Markos himself has had something to say about that.
But tracking the count is my little corner of the dKos diary universe. Below the fold is my report on the recount situation as of COB last night...
Through Monday night, 24 of Washington's 39 counties had reported the results of their hand recounts. Seven of those counties filed their reports on Monday. Before getting to the new ones, however, I want to follow up on something noted in
yesterday's diary.
I'd mentioned that Lewis County mistakenly reported their count of registered voters where they were supposed to give the tally of ballots counted. Though I doubt that the Lewis County Auditor, or anyone in the Secretary of State's office, reads my dKos diaries, between the two offices they saw the error and corrected it by Monday night. Lewis County now reports having tallied 32,948 ballots, exactly the same number they counted in the machine recount.
As noted, seven counties were added to the dataset on Monday. As was done previously during the hand count, I'll list their pertinent information below. The counties are listed alphabetically:
- Asotin -- added 10 Rossi votes, 5 Gregoire votes, counted same number of ballots as in the machine recount. Uses the BCCS 228 Punchcard system.
- Benton -- Gregoire +3, Rossi +5, no change in total ballots tallied. One of three counties using the ES&S Punchcard system.
- Douglas -- Gregoire and Rossi each gained 1 vote, while the county reported counting 3 fewer ballots than in the machine recount. Votes using ES&S Opscan 150 machines.
- Island -- Gregoire +7, Rossi +3, tallied 2 more ballots than in machine recount. Another BCCS Punchcard 228 county.
- Kittitas -- no changes in the votes received by candidates, but they counted 1 ballot fewer than in the first recount. ES&S Opscan 315 model.
- San Juan -- no changes for Rossi and Gregoire, but Ruth Bennett lost 1 vote. Same ballot count as in machine recount. Uses the Global AccuVote optical scan system (as does King County).
- Yakima -- Rossi +35, Gregoire +20, no change in ballot count. Uses eSlate System touch-screen voting.
On the day, Christine Gregoire's total rose by 36 votes while Dino Rossi's vote increased by 54 and Ruth Bennett lost 1 vote. All this while counting 2 fewer votes than in the machine recount.
Two of the day's counties deserve special mention, I think. Asotin County found 15 additional valid for-a-candidate votes among just 8961 ballots. That's a "found votes" rate of 16.7/10000, the highest we've seen so far. The previous leader, and the only other one in double-figures, was Kitsap County at 13.5/10000.
Then there's Yakima County, one of the three counties in Washington using touch-screen voting. My understanding is that touch-screen systems would simply reprint their logs from the initial count, because the state doesn't require a paper audit trail or any other such safeguard. Yet Yakima County found 55 additional valid votes in the hand recount. All of those must have come from the absentee and provisional ballots, which can't be handled through touch-screen technology. According to the Yakima County Auditor's Office (see page 2 of the .pdf), over 70% of the county's voters were absentees. In terms of the "found votes" rate, Yakima comes in at 7.5/10000 overall. But if we assume that all of the additional votes emerged from their non-poll voters, the rate among those ballots where human pattern recognition abilities could actually be applied would be more like 10.8/10000.
Summarizing the results of the hand recount through Monday, the 24 reporting counties represent only 20% of the total statewide vote. Furthermore, the overwhelming majority (88.3%!) of the already-recounted votes come from counties that favored Dino Rossi. Thus far, the manual recount has revealed 338 additional for-a-candidate votes (190 for Rossi, 144 for Gregoire, 4 for Bennett) among 577,835 tallied ballots, some 12 fewer ballots than in the machine recount. The "new-found" rate is 5.85/10000, down from Friday's 7.14/10000, leading to a current (simplistic) estimate that the grand total of additional identifiable votes will come to 1687.
Whether we can really say much based on just one-fifth of the total votes, especially in light of the huge proprtion coming from Republican counties, is anyone's guess. I won't hazard one.
But the news from King County and the Supreme Court raises an intriguing scenario.
As of yesterday, the Republicans didn't seem to offer any objection to King County Auditor Dean Logan's intent to ask the County Canvassing Board to add those improperly-rejected votes to the recount denominator. Simultaneously, they were in court arguing against urging all county auditors to be as diligent as Logan was. It seems to make no sense that they would watch the Democratic behemoth add to its ballot denominator while arguing that other counties don't have to do any such thing if they don't want to. It's pretty clear to me, from the identical and near-identical initial/machine/hand results we're seeing in many counties, that few others are availing themselves of the opportunity to re-examine rejected ballots.
Are the WA Republicans setting up to contest the election should Gregoire edge ahead in this final recount? After their lawyer argued against the Democrats yesterday, would they actually have the chutzpah to argue an equal protection case -- some counties recanvassed their reject ballots, other didn't -- based on the state Supreme Court's decision this morning?
I wouldn't put it past them.