elevated from the diaries by DemFromCT. More unfinished 2004 business
When last we spoke, the electoral results for governor of Washington were so close -- a 261-vote lead for Republican Dino Rossi over Democrat Christine Gregoire -- that a mandatory automated recount had been triggered. Despite interference by Chris Vance, the slimebucket state GOP chair, that recount is progressing rapidly.
One small county actually completed and reported its recount on Saturday. Klickitat County fed the same 9309 ballots through its tabulators a second time, and found that Rossi picked up one additional vote. That extra vote came at the expense of neither Gregoire nor Libertarian candidate Ruth Bennett; either someone had written in Rossi's name instead of marking the appropriate place on the ballot, or a ballot that had previously failed to register did trip the counters this time. That's what recounts are all about, isn't it?
Thus, after one day, one county changed the margin by one vote. But the real story would start to unfold on Monday as additional county results began to arrive.
Indeed, county results poured in hot and heavy on Monday. By the end of the day, 24 of the 39 counties in the state had completed their recounts. Interestingly, the second time around, most of the counties came up with more votes for one or more of the candidates. Only two (Stevens and Yakima) came out with exactly the same numbers as they had the first time around, and only Jefferson County counted fewer total votes than previously (added 1 apiece for Gregoire and Bennett, subtracted 4 from Rossi).
In almost all cases, the changes were very small. Of the 72 possible candidate counts (24 counties, 3 candidates in each), only six outcomes differed from the original by more than 5 votes. By far the largest differences -- in fact, the only ones in double figures -- came from Adams and Kittitas Counties. In Adams, Gregoire received 12 more votes than in the original count, but the county found 27 more Rossi votes than before. The story was similar in Kittitas -- add 19 Gregoire votes, 26 more for Rossi.
For the day, the 24 reporting counties added 60 additional votes to Christine Gregoire's total, 85 to Dino Rossi's, and 7 to Ruth Bennett's, extending Rossi's putative advantage over Gregoire (if no margins change in the remaining counties) to 286 votes.
However, even though over 60% of Washington's counties have already reported their recounts, they represent a small fraction of the total vote count. Those 24 counties recounted only 734,368 ballots, less than 25% of the 2.88 million votes originally recorded. Of the eight counties with at least 100,000 registered voters, only two (Clark and Thurston) reported their recounts on Monday. Conversely, 14 of the 16 smallest counties in the state have completed their task of recounting ballots.
Four of the eight counties where Gregoire led have reported their recounts, but three of those counties (Jefferson, Pacific, and San Juan) were her smallest. Thurston County, containing state capital Olympia, was the only large Gregoire county to report. However, it must be noted that she ended up with a net loss of two votes in the Thurston recount. All in all, only about 21% of Monday's recounted votes came from Gregoire counties. So, if there exists any tendency for candidates to gain on their opponents in counties where they already lead, perhaps she'll be able to narrow, or even reverse, Rossi's edge in the next day or two.
At the end of the day on Monday, Rossi appeared to be far ahead of Gregoire. He had 55.4% of the recounted votes, to just 42.3% for Gregoire, and led by almost 93,000 votes. But nearly all of his best counties have already reported. In the first count, Gregoire drew fewer than 40% of the vote in 16 counties; 13 of those counties have already reported, with only Franklin, Grant, and Walla Walla still to come. On Tuesday, we should hear from Cowlitz, Grays Harbor, and Whatcom, where Gregoire holds small leads. And King County, the 800-pound Democratic gorilla, is expected to report its recount on Wednesday.
As mentioned earlier, state GOP head Chris Vance has been making a larger-than-usual ass of himself by bringing suit in federal court to interfere with the King County recount as it proceeds. He wants the elections officials to stop the practice of examining ballots that fail to register votes, in order to enhance the voter's clear intent. In many cases, the voter may have outlined an oval, or used a checkmark or an "X", or circled a candidate's name, or written in a name that already exists on the ballot, or any of a hundred other ways to not follow clear instructions. In such cases, election officials -- both a Democrat and a Republican -- will often agree on what is unequivocally the voter's intent, and mark a ballot such that it will be accurately recorded. If they don't agree, the disputed ballot goes to a county canvassing board (again, with bipartisan membership) for adjudication.
Vance's problem in his lawsuit is twofold -- a) Washington law apparently requires counties to use such a procedure in their counts, and b) he is objecting to the process only in King County. Which is, of course, by far the biggest county in the state and by far the most likely source of a significant increase in the number of votes for Christine Gregoire. Funny how that happens to be the county targeted by Chris Vance. Shades of Florida 2000!?!
Parenthetically, I've observed that counties may interpret the statutes on performing recounts idiosyncratically. I'm trying to understand how it is that two counties, Douglas and Pend Oreille, reported appreciably fewer counted ballots than in the original tally. Pend Oreille is particularly interesting -- its original count showed 6262 ballots counted, of which 6104 were cast for one of the three candidates displayed on the ballot. One assumes that the other 158 were blank or write-ins. In the recount, the county uncovered six additional Gregoire votes and two more for Rossi, so the three on-ballot candidates received 6112 votes. Yet their reported total count in the recount came to 6114. So how did Pend Oreille County detect eight more votes for the known candidates while examining 148 fewer ballots than they did the first time around?
This recount should be completed before Thanksgiving Day. The next step after that is the Secretary of State's certification of the results, to be submitted on December 2. At that point, any candidate may request another statewide recount. Such a recount would require the requestor to pay a large deposit, 15 cents per vote for a machine recount or 25 cents per vote for a hand recount. The deposit required to do the latter would come to somewhere over $700 thousand. If such a recount turned out to reverse the outcome, however, the deposit would be refunded to that campaign. Only time will tell where this one is going.