54 count 200,737
Safeguards built into hand count, official says

By Jim Haley   EverettHerald   14 December 2004

EVERETT - In a leased room across the street from the Snohomish County Courthouse, 27 pairs of people sat at folding tables in a location usually reserved for machines that rapidly count votes.

The more-tedious human element came into play Monday as Snohomish County began counting ballots from the Nov. 2 gubernatorial election - for the third time.

The first two counts were by machines, and this is the first hand recount in the state's prolonged job of determining whether Republican Dino Rossi or Democrat Christine Gregoire will take office as governor next month.

Rossi finished the first recount just 42 votes ahead of Gregoire, prompting the Democrats to pony up $730,000 as a down payment for the manual count. Some counties already have finished, and Snohomish County should have its tally completed Wednesday. Certification is slated for Thursday.

In neighboring King County, where nearly 900,000 votes were cast election day, election officials say they will ask that county's canvassing board Wednesday to amend its general election report to include 561 votes that weren't counted earlier. Those votes were mistakenly rejected because the signatures on the ballots did not match the voter registration records, election director Dean Logan said. Original registration records should have been retrieved to verify the ballot signatures, and they were not, Logan said in a news release.

"The mistake was on our part in not finding signatures of what appear to be eligible voters," Logan said.

The 561 King County ballots could swing the election for Gregoire. She won about 58 percent of the vote there.

But as of Monday night, with 24 of the state's 39 counties completing their hand recounts, Rossi had gained 46 votes.

Island County finished its hand recount a day early Monday. Gregoire picked up seven votes and Rossi three.

In Snohomish County, election officials discovered 224 uncounted ballots stored in a vault Nov. 22 during the machine recount. The Snohomish County canvassing board accepted those in the recount.

The current hand recount is laced with safeguards in tallying 200,737 absentee votes, and the word "accuracy" was drilled into the minds of those doing the counting before it started Monday, Snohomish County Auditor Bob Terwilliger said.

Another 96,231 ballots were cast on electronic voting machines Election Day, and 94,708 of those people voted in the governor's race.

The political parties and Secretary of State Sam Reed agreed last week that it wouldn't be necessary to print out the votes cast on the electronic voting machines, but safeguards are being taken to make sure the numbers there match with what was reported election night.

The machines have information stored in two locations, and teams of people are checking the output of each of the 937 machines used on Election Day to make sure there aren't any changes from the original report.

Counting the paper absentee ballots is a more burdensome venture. A Democrat and a Republican are teamed at each counting station, and each party is allowed four observers who can roam freely among them. All visitors are kept outside the counting area.

Boxes of ballots from the various precincts are brought from a secure area to each counting station one box at a time. The workers sort the ballots into piles, one each for Rossi, Gregoire and Libertarian Ruth Bennett.

Three more piles are established for those who did not cast a vote in the race, those who voted for more than one candidate and those who wrote in a candidate other than Rossi or Gregoire. Both members of the team count each pile and must agree.

The workers fill out tally sheets and send the sheets to another group of workers who compare the numbers with the machine-generated recount in November. If the numbers don't match, yet another team counts the same ballots. They keep counting until the numbers match either the machine recount or the current hand recount, Terwilliger said.