Update [2004-12-15 18:21:59 by N in Seattle]:In one of those delicious little ironies, RonK notes another well-known King County resident (aside from County Council chair Larry Phillips) whose ballot was erroneously rejected due to the signature-comparison snafu.
Who is it? None other than Andy Stephenson, intrepid colleague of Bev Harris.
I am not making this up! His information is in row 477 of the spreadsheet available from the King County elections website.
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Yes, it's still another episode in that long-running serial, the Washington governor's race. By now, Kossacks have seen my sometimes-daily updates on whichever phase of the vote-counting is underway.
For background, please refer to yesterday's report, my weekend review, and wrapups of the initial count and the mandatory recount. Other aspects of the saga have been covered admirably as well -- in particular, see SusanHu's diaries on the erroneously-rejected King County ballots and the Supreme Court's rejection of the Democratic lawsuit.
As of Tuesday night, 32 of the state's 39 counties had completed their hand recounts. Analysis of the Tuesday additions is below the fold...
Eight counties reported on Tuesday. That pretty much exhausts the supply of small counties in the state. Of the seven counties still uncounted, only one has fewer than 100,000 registered voters; only two counties above the 100K-voter threshold (Clark and Kitsap) have reported their results thus far. For the record, we're still waiting for, in ascending order by size:
- Skagit -- 63,185 registered voters; between Seattle and Canada
- Whatcom -- 106,094 voters; on the Canadian border above Skagit (Bellingham)
- Thurston -- 137,742 voters; south of Puget Sound (Olympia)
- Spokane -- 251,184 voters; the metropolis of eastern WA
- Snohomish -- 352,238 voters; directly north of Seattle and King County
- Pierce -- 405,023 voters; directly south of King County (Tacoma)
- King -- 1,082,406 voters; Seattle, Redmond, Bellevue, and environs
OK, so that's what remains to be counted. On Tuesday, the following counties submitted their hand-recounted tallies to the Washington Secretary of State:
- Chelan -- added 1 vote for Rossi, tallied 1 more ballot than on the machine recount. Uses Global AccuVote opscan equipment.
- Clark -- Rossi +30, Gregoire +28, added 2 to machine recount tally. BCCS Punchcard 228 system.
- Cowlitz -- Gregoire lost 3 votes, Rossi lost 2. Mistakenly reported count of "Registered Voters" instead of "Ballots Counted", falsely indicating 100% turnout. Votes with ES&S Opscan 550 machines.
- Franklin -- Rossi +15, Gregoire +10, hand recount found 98 more valid ballots than in the first recount. Uses Sequoia Data-Vote punchcards.
- Grant -- Rossi gained 2 while Gregoire lost 5 votes, 9 fewer valid ballots than in machine recount. ES&S Opscan 550 equipment.
- Klickitat -- no changes whatsoever from machine recount
- Okanogan -- Rossi +10, Gregoire +6, Bennett +3, with no change in the number of ballots tallied. Uses BCCS Punchcard 228 system.
- Whitman -- Gregoire +4, Rossi +2. Ballot tally is confusing, because they erroneously reported the three-candidate total (ignoring blanks and write-ins) as "Ballots Counted" during the first recount; hand recount reports 51 more valid ballots than in the initial count. Votes with ES&S Opscan 150 machines.
Whoa ... some funky stuff in these results. In Franklin County, 25 new for-a-candidate votes were tallied, but apparently they also found 73 additional valid blank or write-in ballots; that seems strange. Whitman County's never-corrected "Ballots Counted" number in the machine recount can be readily discounted as a harmless mistake, as can Cowlitz's false report of 100% turnout. The latter will be noticed and corrected eventually.
But much else is odd in Cowlitz County. Its count of valid votes for the candidates decreases each time they look at the ballots! Not nearly as much this time as in the machine recount, where the three-candidate total plummeted by 69, but still a decrease. I'll be really curious to see Cowlitz's actual "Ballots Counted" number when they discover their current mistake, because the machine recount came out with 99 fewer valid ballots than the initial count. As a final oddity in Cowlitz County, the Secretary of State website -- otherwise exemplary in its clarity and accuracy -- shows that Libertarian Ruth Bennett's 1094 hand-counted votes are an increase of +1 over the machine recount, while at the same time the SoS reports that she received 1094 votes in the machine recount. Curious, eh?
The day-total for changes comes to +58 for Rossi, +40 for Gregoire, +3 for Bennett. Due to the Cowlitz problem, the prior Whitman snafu, and the big change in Franklin, it's pretty much impossible to say how the total ballot tally has been affected by Tuesday's additions. Hopefully, some of those will be straightened out later on.
The composite story through Tuesday is that, even with over four-fifths of all counties reporting, only about 32% of Washington's gubernatorial ballots have been recounted. A mere 13% of the recounted ballots were cast in counties where Christine Gregoire outpolled Dino Rossi. Some 439 new for-a-candidate votes have been tallied -- 184 for Gregoire, 248 for Rossi, 7 for Bennett. If we accept all numbers shown on the Secretary of State website, including the clearly-erroneous ballot count from Cowlitz County, the new-found vote rate is now 4.8/10000 ballots. From that value, we can estimate that the total number of new-found votes for a candidate might be 1375. That's down quite a bit from Monday (5.8/10000, 1687) and the weekend (7.1/10000, 2058). However, this estimate doesn't take into account the several hundred improperly-invalidated ballots from King County.
Wait-and-see remains the only rational outlook on the Washington gubernatorial race.