1 hour ago Update: WHERE did the extra King Co ballots come from? And why were the military votes so late? Where were they?????
Governor's race going back and forth
Tuesday, November 16, 2004 - Page updated at 05:18 P.M.
By Ralph Thomas and Keith Ervin
Seattle Times staff reporters
seattletimes.nwsource.com
A judge ruled today that King County should continue counting provisional ballots, despite protests from Republicans.
Superior Court Judge Dean Lum refused to grant a temporary restraining order against the state's largest county, a stronghold of support for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Christine Gregoire.
The ruling affects less than 1,000 ballots, but the governor's race is so close that those ballots could make a huge difference. This afternoon, Republican Dino Rossi led Gregoire by 236 votes, out of 2.8 million ballots cast.
The court battle over provisional voters erupted earlier today when the state Republican Party intervened in a lawsuit filed by state Democrats over the way those votes are being counted.
Lum last Friday released the names of 929 provisional-ballot voters whose ballots were rejected because of missing or mismatched signatures.
Both parties worked over the weekend to contact those voters and yesterday state Democratic Chairman Paul Berendt delivered a box of affidavits from more than 400 absentee and provisional voters whose votes had been tentatively disqualified by election officials because of signature problems.
Berendt said he expects to bring another 200 affidavits today.
But state Republicans argued that what the Democrats did using affadavits wasn't legal. "This is wrong. The potential for fraud is obvious," said state Republican chairman Chris Vance in announcing the state party is intervening in the lawsuit. "King County should either match the signature to the original signature on file, or require those provisional voters to present themselves in person to the King County elections staff."
The issue was heard this afternoon by Lum, who was asked to decide that the King County Elections Office treat provisional ballots as they treat absentee ballots and voters should be notified of signature problems. King County contacts absentee voters, but not provisional ones. Provisional voters whose votes weren't counted aren't notified until after the election.
Yesterday, with her hopes of being elected governor slipping away, Democratic Attorney General Christine Gregoire got just the break she needed yesterday when thousands of extra ballots turned up in King County.
The unexpectedly large batch of outstanding ballots — nearly double what the county projected just three days earlier — helped push Gregoire back ahead of Republican Dino Rossi.
Rossi started the day yesterday with a nearly 2,000-vote lead, but by nightfall was trailing by 158 votes after nearly 30,000 more absentee and provisional ballots were tallied statewide.
Gregoire's lead represented about one one-hundredth of 1 percent of the nearly 2.8 million votes counted in the race.
It appears increasingly likely the race will go to a recount, which is required if the final difference is less than one-half of 1 percent and less than 2,000 votes. If the margin is less than 150 votes, the recount must be done by hand unless the candidates agree to another procedure.
In what has been an emotional roller-coaster ride for both campaigns, yesterday's count marked the fourth time the lead has changed hands in the two weeks since Election Day.
There were an estimated 21,700 ballots left to tally statewide — ranging from 4,000 in King County to less than five in some counties. Election officials have until tomorrow to finish counting and certify the vote.
Since Friday, King County estimated it had about 11,000 absentee and provisional ballots left to count. But county officials stunned both campaigns when they announced they were counting nearly 17,000 ballots yesterday and still would have 4,000 more to count today.
King County Elections Director Dean Logan said the number of votes left in the county turned out to be higher than estimated because more absentee voters than expected returned their ballots and a larger-than-expected number of provisional ballots were found valid.
A big batch of new ballots from King County was about the only thing that could have salvaged the race for Gregoire. She is leading Rossi by a nearly 60-40 ratio there but is trailing almost everywhere else in the state.
Rossi is leading Gregoire in 32 of 39 counties, and more than half of the outstanding ballots are estimated to be in those counties.
For Rossi and the Republicans, the situation is hauntingly similar to what happened in the 2000 race for the U.S. Senate.
In that race, Democrat Maria Cantwell trailed incumbent Republican Sen. Slade Gorton throughout most of the two-week absentee-ballot count. But Cantwell surged ahead of Gorton after King County tallied 3,000 more ballots than expected on the next-to-last day of counting.
Provisional ballots may be cast when a voter goes to a different polling place or when there are uncertainties about the voter's eligibility. They also are used by absentee voters who didn't receive ballots in the mail.
Logan had projected a return rate of 83 percent to 84 percent of absentee ballots, but the number rose to between 87 and 88 percent, in large part because of late returns from voters overseas or serving in the armed forces.
"Late last week, Logan projected a provisional-ballot validation rate of just more than 80 percent, but by yesterday it had reached 84 percent. The number is difficult to estimate, Logan said, noting that 90 percent of provisional votes were counted in the September primary, but only 78 percent in the 2000 presidential election."
"It was just an estimate," Logan said of the projection that the county would tally only 11,000 votes today and tomorrow. The estimate was off by 10,000.
Rossi campaign spokeswoman Mary Lane, citing "a huge discrepancy" between the projected and actual number of votes in King County, said she couldn't rule out a legal challenge.
"We would obviously have to have a good reason for challenging," Lane said. "The first question to ask is where did these all come from and how do you make a miscalculation that's off by 10,000 votes with two days left to go before certification?"
For now, Lane said, the campaign's focus is "to knock on doors all across the state" looking for pro-Rossi provisional voters with signature problems.
State Elections Director Nick Handy said it is difficult to project the number of absentee and provisional votes. After the September primary, he said, the number of those ballots turned out to be double what counties had forecast.
"Every county in the state is changing their estimate every day because that's the nature of the process," Handy said.
Pierce County Auditor Pat McCarthy said King County's experience illustrates how difficult it is to project the total vote. "If you go too high, people say, 'What happened to those ballots?' You tend to go lower because you don't want that kind of thing to happen."
Democrats have been contacting voters since King County Superior Court Judge Dean Lum ruled Friday that King County must give the party a list of all provisional voters who have been told their votes won't be counted unless they sign new voter-registration cards.
Some 929 provisional voters and about 800 absentee voters either failed to sign the envelopes containing their ballots or used signatures that didn't look like the signatures on their voter-registration cards.
Logan said he is treating voter-signed documents delivered by a political party as valid as documents brought in by the voter or delivered through the mail.
State Republican Party Chairman Chris Vance said yesterday his party's lawyers have been scrutinizing the legality of Democrats' "publicity stunt" of delivering voter affidavits to election officials. He said the law is unclear on the practice but said the party had not, "as of 6:20 tonight," decided to go to court.
Republican canvassers have been encouraging voters to deliver documents to election officials in person, Vance said.
Material from the Associated Press was included in this report. |
