Judge says no to GOP, won't halt recount

By Lynn Thompson
Seattle Times staff reporter   22 November 2004
 
A federal judge yesterday denied a request by the state Republican Party to stop the King County recount of votes in the tightly contested race for governor between Dino Rossi and Christine Gregoire.

Despite the judge's ruling, Republicans stepped up their attacks on how election workers in the heavily Democratic county were handling ballots. Gregoire, a Democrat, won King County with 57 percent of the approximately 898,000 votes cast, but she trailed Republican Rossi by 261 votes statewide. The small margin triggered an automatic machine recount.

Chris Vance, head of the state Republican Party, accused King County election officials of partisan decision-making in their visual examination of ballots rejected during the machine recount.
 
 
 

He said problems with the recount were reminiscent of the troubled 2002 county election that resulted in the firing of the county elections superintendent.

King County elections officials said they are following the same standards used across the state to determine voters' intent in cases where the optical-scanning machine rejects a ballot. The problems in the 2002 election involved absentee ballots mailed late to voters, officials said, and have no relation to this recount.

"The judge didn't rule in their favor, and now they're doing anything they can to disrupt the process," said King County Elections Director Dean Logan. "It's disappointing that they're reduced to the level of degrading the process."

In yesterday's court ruling, U.S. District Judge Marsha Pechman said there would be no irreparable harm in allowing the King County recount to go forward.

In denying the Republicans' request for a temporary restraining order, she said ballots were not being destroyed and could be reviewed later, so there was no need to call an immediate halt to the recount.

She made the decision about 1 p.m. yesterday in a conference call that included attorneys for the state and national Republican Party, the state Democratic Party, the secretary of state and the King County elections division.

 Pechman did not rule on the merits of the Republicans' lawsuit, which challenges how King County is recounting ballots. The case was expected to be assigned to another judge today, said Janine Joly, a senior deputy prosecutor representing King County.

On Saturday, Republicans filed the lawsuit and asked for a restraining order to stop the recount in King County, arguing that the ballots rejected by the optical-scanning machine were being treated differently from punch-card ballots used in 14 other counties.

They alleged that King County election workers were attempting to determine voter intent, even where ballots were unclear.
 
 
 

Election officials say workers enhance or duplicate ballots when they can clearly determine a voter's intent. For example, a voter may have circled a name instead of filling in an oval, or filled in an oval and also written in the same candidate's name. The machines may also reject ballots that were properly marked but torn or wrinkled.

The Republican Party did not file lawsuits in any other counties, although 23 use the same optical-scanning machines to read ballots as King County does. Two counties, Yakima and Snohomish, use touch-screen voting but optically scan mail-in votes.

The state director of elections, Nick Handy, said the standards for counting ballots are the same in every county. Both punch-card and optically scanned ballots are visually examined in questionable cases to see if a voter's intent can be clearly determined.

Handy said the state drafted new regulations for determining how ballots are counted in the wake of the close 2000 presidential election, in which the outcome turned on how election officials in Florida counted the hanging chads and dimpled chads of punch-card ballots. The U.S. Supreme Court, in Bush v. Gore, ruled that states must use uniform standards in counting ballots.  
"The goal in this state is to ensure that every vote counts," Handy said.

Vance said he was "very concerned" that partisan politics could be playing a role in how new, replacement ballots were being filled out by election workers interpreting questionable ballots.

Vance yesterday accused King County Elections Superintendent Bill Huennekens, a Democrat, of ordering ballots that were "clearly and fully marked for Dino Rossi" to not be counted. Huennekens called that claim untrue, saying the ballots in question had been marked for both Gregoire and Rossi.

Vance said Huennekens has Democratic Party political ties and added that County Executive Ron Sims, a Democrat, has a history of "hiring political hacks to run his elections."

Huennekens called the charges "insulting." Although he once was a Mason County Democratic precinct committeeman, he has been an elections-policy analyst under secretaries of state Ralph Munro and Sam Reed, both Republicans.

Logan, the county elections director, said Huennekens is a "professional-elections administrator" whose appointment was confirmed unanimously by a bipartisan King County Council.

Logan said King County is following state rules in recounting ballots. He said records are kept if a new ballot is created to replace a questionable one, and both ballots are retained. Any King County ballots for which election workers can't determine a voter's intent ? for instance, where a voter's mark was outside a candidate's oval ? will be reviewed by the county canvassing board over the next few days.

Among other complaints, Republicans said an improperly sealed box of ballots contained 201 ballots ? two more than a receipt on the box said it should have had.

Logan said such discrepancies occur occasionally, and that in any such case, the box is set aside and counted again to make sure it has the right number of ballots.

Republicans also pointed to precincts in which fewer ballots were on hand when the recount started than on Election Day. At one point, as the county prepared for the recount, it appeared that 88 ballots were missing from one precinct, Vance said.

The ballots were later found in a polling-supply bag, which Logan said a poll worker used on Election Night because the ballots wouldn't fit into a box. He said the ballots had been in the custody of elections officials the entire time.

A mandatory recount in the governor's race was required because fewer than 2,000 votes separated the candidates out of about 2.8 million votes cast statewide. There's never been a governor's race this close.

Out of 39 counties, only little Klickitat County in Southwest Washington, with about 9,000 total votes, had finished its recount yesterday. Rossi picked up one vote there.

Many counties expect to complete their machine recounts today. But King County will not certify its results until late Wednesday, officials said.

Material from the Associated Press was included in this report.